Black fine line tally marks tattooed in a curved row across the back of a neck, below dark hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tally marks across the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close view from behind shows a row of black tally marks, made of groups of four upright strokes crossed by a fifth, with single dots between some groups. The thin, even linework follows the curve of the neck, and the marks are set against smooth skin. The composition is tightly cropped to the neck and hairline, with the ink as the clear focus.

Fine line Neck Tally marks Line Dot Neck

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reeve of Lessing Vale could not write his letters, so he kept the years on the salt-house doorpost with a bread knife. Four upright strokes for every ten days, a fifth drawn across them to close the group, and a dot wherever a debt had been paid in full. Nobody in the vale could read the marks, but everybody knew what they meant, which was the same thing as knowing when to hide the grain.

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His daughter Idrenne learned the strokes before her prayers. In the wet year, when the river took the mill and the king's men came up the valley twice in one month, she stood at the doorpost and counted aloud. Her father's knife had cut both visits as one group with no dot between them, and the tithe on the grain was now owed twice over.

The king's men would not believe a girl. They would believe a doorpost, though, if it stood in front of them, and a doorpost could not be carried down the valley. So Idrenne sat up one night with her father's knife and a candle, and cut the true count into the skin at the back of her own neck, where her hair would cover it and no tax-man would think to look. She did not cut the dots until she had checked each group against the wood twice.

In the spring the men came again. The seneschal read the count from the doorpost, found it true, and rode away frowning. Nobody asked the girl to lift her hair. Idrenne kept the knife in her apron and the marks under her collar, and every year after she added a stroke for each ten days of her life, though her father had long since stopped counting anything.