Close-up of a fine line tattoo of ruler tick marks and the numerals 1 and 2 running along the side of a finger, in black ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ruler markings tattooed along a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A finger is shown from the side with a row of evenly spaced black tick marks, longer at intervals, and the numerals 1 and 2 tattooed along it, imitating a ruler. The lines are thin, crisp and uniform, in solid black ink with no shading. The finger rests on a yellow wooden surface, with a silver ring on the neighbouring finger and red nail polish visible.

Fine line Hand Number Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the Thursday the folding rule had gone the way of everything else at Tallis and Son, and the lintel for the Cromer Road chapel still needed cutting. You stand in the yard with your sleeve pushed up while Walter Tallis takes your left hand without asking, lays it flat on the bench as if checking a board for warp, and uncaps the pot of Indian ink he uses for marking oak. He draws the ticks with the nib of a steel pen, one for each eighth and longer ones for each inch, and he numbers the first two so you will know where the feet begin.

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"Don't rub it off in the bath," he says. "Your mother will skin you." You say nothing. The ink smells of pencil shavings and cold tea. Through the open door the planer goes up and down the Hadley boards and the dust settles on your knuckles like flour. For a week you measure everything against yourself: the step to the post office, the gap under the church door where the draught comes in, the width of your sister's pram, which is one and seven eighths of you if you are careful.

The rule turns up on the Saturday, wedged behind the glue pot, yellow and blunt. Walter looks at it, then at your hand, and says nothing about the cost of the ink. You could take a pen to it now. Instead you lay the finger along the lintel, nail to the bevel, and read off the cut: four feet, two and a quarter. He nods once. The chapel gets its beam.

That evening you hold your hand under the kitchen tap until the ticks blur to grey, and they do not quite go. Your mother asks what you have been doing all week. You tell her you have been keeping count.