Back view of a person with long dark hair, showing a small black lettering tattoo of Roman numerals on the shoulder.

Small Roman numerals on the upper back

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A person with long dark hair is photographed from behind, with their head turned away from the camera. A small tattoo of Roman numerals reading XXIX XII sits on the upper back near the shoulder, drawn in black ink with fine, even lines. The plain pale background keeps the focus on the small lettering and the skin tone.

Lettering Shoulder Roman numeral Numeral Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The beech at the forest edge had been cut by a surveyor before my grandmother was born, and the numerals had weathered to a grey shiver. Every winter the village sent someone up the track with a knife and a pot of lamp black to cut them fresh, so the boundary stayed where the lawyers in Ashby said it was. The job fell to me the year Father's knee gave out.

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Mr Hollis, who kept the almanac at the Plough, told me the date mattered more than the cutting. XXIX XII, he said, was the last day the Crane Wood could be entered without a warden's leave, and the old warden had gone under the frost the winter before. I laughed at him. He did not laugh back. He pressed a pencil stub into my hand and a list of names to carry up the path.

I went up at first light on the twenty-ninth with the knife in my coat and the list in my teeth. Snow had drifted over the stile and the rooks were quiet. When I reached the beech, the numerals were already there, cut fine and even, and the bark beneath them had been blacked so carefully that I could not find a single stray mark. Someone had got there before me and done the job better than I ever could.

I stood a long while with the knife in my hand. Then I put it away, folded the list into my pocket, and walked back down to the village, where the lamps were being lit one by one and somebody was calling me in to supper.