Small black fine line Roman numerals run vertically down the back of a person's ankle, above white canvas trainers.

Vertical Roman numerals on an ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a small tattoo of Roman numerals arranged in a vertical column on the back of a lower leg, just above the ankle. The characters are thin, dark, evenly spaced black linework with no shading. The shot is taken from behind on a grey carpeted floor, with dark trousers and white canvas trainers framing the tattoo, and the photo has a warm, faded filter.

Lettering Ankle Roman numeral Numeral Column Lettering

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad kept the count in chalk on the cabin door, a column of strokes he added every time we cleared a lock on the Leeds and Liverpool. He never trusted the lock-keepers to remember us, and he never trusted himself to remember which pound we were in, so the chalk went up in tens and fives, and I was the one who rubbed it off with my sleeve when Mum said the paint would bubble.

Keep reading

The winter we were iced in at Burnley, the count stopped. Dad sat on the front deck with his flask and watched the ice crack under the bow, and I started a list of my own on the back of a tide table: the locks we had done, the ones still to come, the ones he had promised once the cut thawed. I wrote them in Roman numerals because the plaque at Wigan used them, and because it looked like something a person would have to be clever to read.

When the thaw came he saw the list and laughed until he coughed. He took the pencil, crossed out the lot, and wrote the total in the margin: eight. Eight locks, he said, was the only number that counted, the ones we got through together. I kept the table in the drawer for years. The pencil has nearly gone now, but I still know what the last line says, and I still count the gates in my head when I cannot sleep.