Black ink tattoo of the numbers 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6 and 8 in a simple lettering style, running diagonally across the upper chest.

Row of numbers across the upper chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small row of black numerals reading 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6 and 8, set in a plain, slightly rounded typeface with a dotted, stippled texture. The line runs diagonally across pale skin, with the decimal points and numerals evenly spaced. The image is a warm, close crop with a dark blurred background at the top edge.

Lettering Chest Number Numeral

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the fifty-millimetre lens is in the box under the till, the one you kept trying to sell as a paperweight. I've written the stops on the tape round the barrel in biro, because your grandfather always said a lens you can't read is a lens you'll guess with. One point four, two, two point eight, four, five point six, eight. Each one lets in half the light of the one before it, so you can count the light out loud when the sky goes grey on you.

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It went grey on us all of last Saturday. The rain came sideways down Garrow Street, the awnings sagged under it, and nobody bought a thing except a woman who wanted a film camera for her son's wedding. She stood at the glass with her hands in her coat pockets, and I thought she was going to walk out, so I took the old body off its hook and asked her to hold still while I metered her face against the dark shopfront. You stop down when there's too much light, I told her. You open up when there's almost none, and you accept the softness, because soft is what the rain gives you.

You've been stopping down since the funeral. I see it in the way you wrap the cups and in the way you keep the shutter of the shop half drawn. Let some in, love. Pick the widest setting the lens will take and trust the film to hold what you can't.

On Sunday evening the market emptied and the gutters ran gold from the streetlamps. I shot the bare stalls at f/1.4 with the shutter at a sixtieth, and the pictures came out the colour of honey and nearly all blur. They're on the bench by the till. Come and look before you close up.