Small black numerals and a slash tattooed along the side of a finger, with a silver camera ring on another finger of the same hand against a grey road surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small numerals tattooed on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand held up against a grey, textured road surface. A small black tattoo of numerals and a slash sits along the side of one finger, drawn in a simple, slightly uneven hand-drawn line. A chunky silver ring shaped like a camera is worn on another finger, and the soft, slightly grainy colour treatment keeps the focus on the marks and the ring.

Hand Numeral Number Hand

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea has gone the colour of wet slate by twenty to five, and the promenade is yours alone. You crouch against the railing, set the aperture to f/2.4 and wait for the swell to break white under the pier, because the light won't hold for long. Your only record is pencilled on the inside of the film box: 1/125, f/2.4, and the date you arrived at Mrs Ostler's, which you copied out twice because you kept getting the month wrong.

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Mrs Ostler does not allow cameras at the breakfast table. She allows them on the landing, where the window faces the water, and she accepts the week's rent in prints of her own front door. You have shot eleven rolls since October. Every one is the same grey wall, the same gull on the same chimney, the same gap in the railings the council never fixed. You have stopped expecting anything to change.

The last roll comes back from the chemist in Hove with a frame you don't remember taking: the pier at dusk, and at its far end a small figure in a yellow sou'wester, facing the lens with one hand raised. It isn't Mrs Ostler. Her mac hangs on the hook by the door, dry as bone. The box says 1/125 at f/2.4, the setting you keep for people you mean to remember.

You pin the print above the bath beside the ledger of numbers and go down to tea. Mrs Ostler asks whether you got anything good. You tell her you're not sure yet, which is the most honest thing you've said in the house.