Close-up of a small black Roman numeral tattoo in lettering style on the back of a hand, with silver rings on the fingers.

Small Roman numeral tattoo on the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand is photographed against a plain beige wall, with several silver rings on the fingers. A small black Roman numeral tattoo sits on the back of the hand near the wrist, set in a simple, solid, lettering-style typeface. The ink is crisp and the composition is centred on the hand with plenty of empty background.

Lettering Hand Roman numeral Numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mould numbers came stamped into the sand-cast iron in capitals, and Walter Pell was the only man on the Attercliffe floor who could read them at a glance without his spectacles. Thirty-one years of it. He could tell a bad pour from a good one by the way the numbers sat on the casting, crowded or square, and he could tell a man's mood by how long he took to hand back a tally slip.

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The spring the new order came in, the numbers started running wrong. Eleven castings to a crate where the drawing said nine, and a row of chalked X's on the lids that nobody had admitted to. Walter took the lids home in his coat pocket, one at a time, and laid them on the kitchen table under the gas light, lining them up beside his daughter's arithmetic. Ten, twenty, thirty. The sums came out clean every time, which was the trouble. Somebody on nights had been counting in tens and calling it a day.

He went down to the yard at six with a tin of black paint and a brush no wider than a matchstick. He did not tell the foreman. He worked the numerals onto the inside of the gate post, where only the lorry drivers would ever stand long enough to read them, slow and square, the way his old master had taught him to letter a pattern plate. The wind came up off the canal while he worked and the paint went tacky on his fingers.

By the time the day shift filed in, the post said what the drawings should have said, and Walter was at his bench with his tally book open, pencil ready. The first crate came off the line warm and rang when he tapped it. He counted nine, then counted again, and when the tenth casting slid out of the sand he set it on the scale and wrote the number down in his own hand.