Collage of three small black dot and bar tattoos on a wrist, the back of a neck and a rib cage, beside a chart of numerals zero to fourteen.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three small dot and bar numeral tattoos

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The collage shows three close photographs of small black tattoos made of dots and horizontal bars, placed on the inner wrist, the nape of the neck and the side of the ribs. Below them is a chart of numerals zero to fourteen, with a shell-like symbol for zero and dots and bars for the other values. The tattoos are simple, solid marks in black ink, and the photos are framed side by side against plain backgrounds.

Forearm Neck Ribs Numeral Dot Bar Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boarding house at Fennick Head had a scullery door that nobody painted, because Mrs Pell marked it every morning with a nail. A dot for each boat that had gone out past the point and come back round it, a bar for every five. She did not count the boats that stayed out. Those she left to the gulls.

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Her lodger that autumn was a chart clerk called Tobias Wren, who had come for the quiet and stayed for the pie. He watched her cut the marks and asked what they meant. She told him it was the sea's arithmetic, and that the sea never carried over a sum. Fourteen was as high as she had ever needed to go, because fourteen boats was the whole of the Fennick fleet, and by the first frost the door showed two bars and four dots, which meant every hull was home.

On the night of the third gale the door showed thirteen. Mrs Pell sat with her hands in her apron and would not lift the nail. Tobias took a lantern down to the harbour and found the last boat, the Constance, drawn up on the shingle with its keel split, its crew asleep in the lee of the net loft, their oilskins steaming by the stove. He counted them twice, out of habit. Fourteen. He climbed the cliff path and told her so.

Mrs Pell cut the fourteenth dot in the morning. Then she pressed the point of the nail into the soft wood beside the figures and scratched one more short bar with nothing above it, for the wind. She said it was a boat only lent out, and would be asked for back. Tobias never learned whether she meant the wind or the sea, but he kept the lodgings another winter, and each morning he read the door before he looked at the weather.