Black ink ruler tattoo showing the numbers 13 to 16 along the side of a torso, above the hip, with a blue bikini top and bottoms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ruler tattoo with numbers 13 to 16 on the side

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a torso wearing a blue textured bikini, with a small black ink tattoo of a ruler on the left side of the waist. The ruler shows the numbers 13, 14, 15 and 16 with fine tick marks, drawn in solid black ink with some light grey shading. The skin tone is warm and the lighting is natural daylight with a soft blur in the background.

Ribs Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You keep the boxwood rule in your apron pocket the morning the Halvorsen boy comes back from the pier with his thumb split open. Out of habit you lay the rule across the cut to judge its length before you think to fetch the bandage. Sixteen inches, you tell him, which is nothing at all, and he is not comforted.

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The house on Wenlock Parade takes summer lodgers, and every August the children are measured against the door frame of the back scullery. Pencil lines sit in a column up the paint, each one dated in your late husband's square hand. Ned cut the notches with that rule, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, the numbers marching upward in the order a man reads them when he is certain of himself.

Ned measured the tide too. Each evening he held the rule against the harbour wall and wrote the water's height on the back of a card, and the card still hangs by the kettle. Mrs Abernethy from number four asked you last week to sell her the rule, saying a child should have something to measure by. You told her it was not yours to sell.

On the last morning of the season you carry the rule down to the sea wall, unfold it to its full length and lay it on the stone. The gulls walk along the brass edge as if it were a path. You cannot tell whether the measure has gone wrong or the wall has settled out of true, and you decide, folding it back into your pocket, that you will not check. The pencil line on the frame stays exactly where it is.