Close photo of a small black ruler-style tattoo with numerals across the lower abdomen, beside a navel, with a fur coat and banknote-print clothing in the frame.

Ruler and numeral tattoo on the lower abdomen

Other · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows a torso with a small tattoo below the navel, drawn as a ruler with tick marks and numerals. The linework is solid black with simple shading, and the design is sharp and compact. The image is coloured mainly by the green banknote-print clothing and the grey fur coat, while the tattoo itself is black ink, and the framing is a close crop of the midsection.

Other Numeral Abdomen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gauge at Ashby Halt had been wrong since the spring thaw, and nobody at the company office would believe it until Tom Harrow brought them the brass rule himself. He laid it across the rails at dawn, the way his father had, and the numerals sat square against the iron: four feet, eight and a half inches, not a hair over. Four foot eight and a half, the old men said, was what the world had been built to, though Tom suspected whoever decided that had never stood in the wet at Ashby with a lantern.

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The company wanted the line widened for the new engines, and their surveyor, a soft-voiced man called Quill, said the rule was a relic and the ticks were a matter of opinion. Tom said nothing. He waited until the surveyor's coach had gone, then walked the length of the platform counting sleepers under his breath, each one a number he had learned before he could write.

The flood came in the night. By morning the embankment below the bridge had slumped and the rails bowed like a tired back. Quill's men stood about with their hands in their pockets, waiting for the works gang from town. Tom went down with a hammer, a bag of spikes and his rule. He set the brass against the bent iron, read the marks, and drove the spikes until the gap sat true to the last tick.

The first train came through at noon with its whistle going, and the driver leaned out to look at the platform, where Tom sat on the bench turning the rule over in his hands. The brass was worn smooth in one place, just under the middle numeral, where his thumb had rested for forty years. Nobody asked him to stop measuring, and nobody ever did.