Close-up of a small black fine-line Roman numeral XII tattoo with a dot between the X and II on the side of a woman's finger, with red nail polish and a car steering wheel behind.

Small Roman numeral XII on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo reading X.II in a serif lettering style sits on the side of a finger between two knuckles. The linework is thin and the ink is solid black, with no shading or added colour. The hand rests against a dark car steering wheel with a silver three-pointed star emblem, and the tattoo is placed near the centre of the frame.

Lettering Hand Roman numeral Numeral Dot Finger

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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

Fourteen minutes past eleven and the lever for the goods siding has stuck again, so I am coaxing it with paraffin and a great deal of language. The frame at Hollin Cross was cast in 1891 and has the manners of a disapproving aunt. Tom Keighley taught me its brass plates before he retired to his allotment. The one I trust is the small stamped mark beside lever ten: X.II, the year the points were relaid after the Calder flood. Nobody knows what the dot is for. Tom said it was the fitter's initial, and he said it with the air of a man who had asked and not been answered.

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The Leeds parcel train is forty minutes late and the sky over the moor is the colour of wet slate. A man in a rain cape walked the platform at half ten carrying a violin case by its handle. He asked whether the eleven-fifty still stopped here. It doesn't, not since the timetable change, and I told him so. He stood under the canopy anyway, turning the case slowly, looking down the line as if something out there still owed him a train.

At twenty to twelve control rang to say the freight had to be clear before the midnight stopper. I put my weight on the lever the way Tom showed me, slow and then all at once. The iron gave with a clunk that went up through my teeth. Out on the dark line the signal lamp swung from red to green, and the freight crept onto the siding like a cat settling into a chair.

When I looked up again the platform was empty and the violin case had gone. In the book I wrote: 11.50, no passengers. Then I crossed out no and wrote one, because the lever was still warm under my palm, and I could have sworn somebody had been holding it with me.