Black ink ruler tattoo marked 1 to 10 running along a person's forearm towards the wrist, with the hand clenched in a fist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ruler tattoo on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ruler tattoo running diagonally along the inner forearm towards the wrist, with graduated tick marks and the numbers 1 to 10 visible. The lines are crisp and even, with the numerals set in a plain, clean typeface, and the shading on the skin is soft. The ink is entirely black and the background is a plain light grey, which keeps the focus on the tattoo and the hand.

Forearm Number Scale Wrist Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had lain on Gallow Farm since Martinmas, and by the third week of January the lane was gone and the ewes stood in the lee of the barn looking reproachful. Old Ned Carrow went out each morning with his rule, a length of ash with brass ticks, and pushed it into the drift by the gate until it stopped. He called the depth aloud. His wife said the counting did no good, but he liked the sound of numbers in the cold.

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One morning the snow answered him. A voice came up out of the drift, low and reasonable, and asked what the rule was for. Ned said it measured what was owed. The voice said it owed him nothing, but it would make a wager. If Ned could mark the whole of the winter on his own body, one to ten, every tick and every numeral, the snow would let the lambs live. If he could not, it would take the lambs, the gate and the farmer too, in whatever order suited it.

Ned was not a clever man, but he was a careful one. He took a sewing needle, dipped it in lamp-black, and pricked the marks into the inside of his wrist the way his mother had marked linen, straight as furrows, from one to ten. When the voice came back he held the arm out over the gatepost. "Here is the measure," he said. "Read it." The snow read the marks slowly, tick by tick, found nothing crooked in them, and because a bargain is a bargain it had to stop at the tenth mark.

The thaw came on the first of March, just as the old bargain promised. Ned kept the dark lines for the rest of his life, and he never measured the snow again. When the lambs were sold that spring he still turned his wrist up to the light before he named a price, and every time he stopped at ten.