Bold black stick figure tattoo with wavy hair and two rotated numerals on the top of a foot, shown on a blue paper surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stick figure and numerals on a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework stick figure with a curly, wavy head sits on the top of a bare foot, with two rotated numerals placed beside its legs. The lines are bold and of even weight, with solid black ink and no shading. The photograph shows the foot against a light blue paper sheet, with the toes visible at the bottom of the frame.

Other Stick figure Numeral Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost has got into the feed shed again, and you are on your knees with a bucket of warm water, scrubbing at the chalk marks on the planks beside the door. Your uncle tells you to leave them be. Dilys drew them the winter her husband went to the mill in Carlisle and didn't come back until March. Every morning she chalked a tally beside the latch: a little man with his arms flung out, hair streaming back as if he were running into the wind, and two numbers at his feet, turned the wrong way round because she always wrote from the far side of the bench.

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You ask what the numbers meant. Your uncle wipes his hands on his coat and says the first was the days left until the lambs, and the second was the days she had decided to stop waiting. He says it like a joke he has told before and never finished. The figure has no face, only a loop for a head, and the wavy lines above it could be wind, or could be her hair the one time she let it down in the yard and laughed at something nobody else heard.

The water has gone cold by the time you reach the last plank. You dip the chalk, and without quite deciding to, you draw a new little man beside the latch, legs wide, and write a number at his feet. Your uncle looks over your shoulder and says nothing, which is his way of saying yes.

By the time you reach the gate the frost is already creeping back over your work, softening the edges of the lines. You leave it there anyway, the man running into the wind, the numbers the right way round for once, because you are the one standing on the far side of the bench now.