Black script numerals 23 with thin black and grey swirling outlines tattooed on the inside of a wrist, in a Lettering and Fine line style.

The number 23 with swirls on a wrist

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on the inner wrist showing the numerals 23 in bold black script. Fine, thin-line swirls loop around and behind the digits, with some outlines fading to grey. The ink is black and grey on pale skin against a soft cream fabric, with the design centred in the frame.

Lettering Fine line Other Number Swirl Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pell kept the lift keys on a red ribbon around her wrist, and she never let anyone else touch them. The tower had twenty-three floors, but the lift only ever stopped at twenty-two, because the builders had numbered the landings wrong in 1961 and nobody had bothered to fix the brass plate. Everyone on the estate said the twenty-third floor was still there, just not where the lift could reach it.

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Tobias Rook, who delivered the milk before school, said he had found it on a wet Tuesday. He had taken the stairs because the lift smelled of cats, and between the twenty-second and twenty-fourth landings there was a green door with a numeral 23 on it in black iron, and loops of fine wire curling round the figures like smoke that had decided to stay. He knocked three times. A woman answered in a grey cardigan, her hands full of thread, and asked him what he had lost.

"Nothing," said Tobias, though his mother's purse had gone missing that week.

She gave him a spool of grey thread and said, "Then carry this down, and tie it to the first thing you find that isn't yours." On the stairs the thread kept unspooling, looping round the banister and the fire hose, until at the bottom he found a child's glove under the post boxes. He tied the thread to it and carried the glove up to its owner on the fourth floor, who was crying in the corridor. When Tobias looked back at the spool, the thread had written his mother's purse into the loops, and it was sitting on the windowsill of Flat 9.

The next morning the lift stopped at twenty-three for the first time, and Mrs Pell pressed the button twice just to be sure.