Fine black script Roman numerals IX, XVI and XI tattooed on the inner wrist of a hand held up against a dark background.

Small Roman numerals on an inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand raised against a dark background, with three Roman numerals, IX, XVI and XI, written in thin black script on the inner wrist. The linework is delicate and even, with small loops and tapering strokes, and the ink is solid black with no shading. The warm, low light falls across the palm and the numerals sit near the lower edge of the frame, with the rest of the image in shadow.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Roman numeral Number Script Wrist

Find an artist for this

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

Mr Hallam never wrote a number in Arabic figures. He said a numeral should look like the thing it counts, so the brass tags on his bench carried Roman marks, scratched in with a steel point. I took it for an old man's fussiness until my second spring, when I could read his tallies faster than the faces they belonged to.

Keep reading

The turret clock at St Olave's had stood silent since Christmas, and the vicar wanted it chiming for the fête. Hallam sent me up the ladder with a card of instructions in his square hand: escapement, pendulum, then the weight cord, which I was to leave alone whatever I was tempted to do. Beneath the instructions, in pencil, were three numerals, IX, XVI, XI. When I asked, he said they were the order the pins came out of the striking train, and that I was not to ask twice.

I did ask twice, the week he died, standing in his workshop with the lamp still warm. I did not pull the pins. I climbed the tower instead, past the bell that had not rung since 1911, and found the three brass pins where he had said, each one stamped with its numeral. Drawn in that order they would have let the great wheel run free, and the whole tower would have shaken itself awake at an hour nobody had chosen. I left them seated.

On the Saturday of the fête I wound the weight myself, set the hands to a quarter past two, and watched the minute hand creep up to the top like an old man on stairs. When the bell spoke, flat and wide over the rooftops, not one person in the churchyard looked up from the tea urn. Hallam would have liked that. The pins are still in my coat pocket, and I have not decided yet which of them I am keeping.