Ruler tattoo across a middle finger

The man spent three days laying his chain across the flats. Each evening he came back to the well with dust in his collar and his figures written in a neat hand, and each evening Ada asked him the same question: did the chain stretch in the heat? He said brass did not stretch. She said her rule had been her mother's, and her mother had been a seamstress, and a seamstress knows that cloth and metal both shift when the sun is on them. He laughed at her, politely, and went back to his tent.

On the fourth morning Ada walked him out to the milestone with a pencil and a strip of card. She made him read each division aloud, a fine tick and then a longer one, until he had counted every mark between the well and the stone. Then she turned the card over and showed him that she had cut it to the length of her own stride, pacing the track each dawn for forty years and notching the count into the wood of her gate.

The surveyor sat down on the milestone. Nine miles, he said quietly. Ada rolled down her sleeves against the glare and said the well was still exactly where it had always been, and that the road had never once asked anybody to be quicker than they were.