Small tattoo of the numerals 451 followed by a degree sign in a serif font, in dark ink on the inner wrist and forearm.

Small 451 degree numerals on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of the numerals 451 and a degree sign sits on the inner wrist of a pale forearm. The characters are set in a simple serif typeface with fine, slightly soft linework and a uniform dark blue-black ink. The photo has a teal tint, and the tattoo sits off-centre on the skin against a dark sleeve.

Lettering Forearm Numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thermometer above the kiln door at the Ashgrove depot read 449 when Mr Pell unlocked it, and he tapped the glass with a thick thumbnail as if it might be lying to him. Four hundred and fifty one, he always said, was the number that mattered. Paper took light at that heat and turned to nothing, and a town that wanted nothing written down needed someone to see it happen every morning.

Keep reading

My job was to sort the crates and keep the needle honest. I was seventeen, quick with my hands, and Pell liked me because I never asked what a page said before it went into the flue. I had got good at not reading. I could carry a whole life of letters across the yard without my eyes catching on a single line.

Then the crate from the Hollis house came in, damp at the corners, holding a book about a tidal estuary. Someone had pencilled tide times in the margins in a child's careful capitals, a column for every week of a year. I sat on the upturned bucket and read them until the bell rang. Instead of feeding it to the fire, I unpicked the signatures and stitched the pages into the lining of my coat, the way my grandmother had sewn coins into hems, with waxed thread and no knot anyone would think to pull.

At the gate Pell patted my pockets out of habit and found only lint and a stub of pencil. Behind us the flue breathed out its grey heat. I thought about those tide tables going up over the marsh as smoke, and then I stopped thinking about them, because my coat was heavy against my ribs and the thermometer had crept to 451 and held there, steady as a held breath, while the numbers inside me kept time with the sea.