Black and white photo of a woman with her hair in a bun, showing a small vertical Roman numeral lettering tattoo on the upper back below the neck.

Vertical Roman numerals on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person with hair in a high bun, wearing a light top with a wide neckline. A small vertical line of Roman numerals in a serif lettering style sits on the upper back, below the neck and between the shoulder blades. The image is black and white, so the ink appears as solid black and grey, and the plain pale wall behind creates a simple, uncluttered composition.

Lettering Back Roman numeral Number Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margit had been carving the same date for three days, and the cold had got into the chisel. The keep at Harrowmere stood open to the sky on its north side, the wall cut away like a loaf, and the lintel above the postern gate was the last job the Ashby family had paid for before the lease ran out. Rain came sideways through the arrow slit. She blew on her knuckles and looked at the numerals she had marked in red ochre on the stone.

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Her brother Tomas arrived with a flask of tea and the parish register, which he held open under his coat to keep it dry. 'They want it right,' he said. 'The year the tower fell, not the year somebody wrote it down.' She read the figures aloud, slowly, the way their grandfather had taught them to count bells, one stroke for each I, a V for five, an X for ten. The serifs were the hardest part. Each foot had to flare like a footing on a wall, or the whole line looked like a fence post.

By dusk the lettering was clean, sharp enough to cut a thumb on. Tomas traced the top stroke with his finger and said nothing for a while. Then he admitted the register had a clerk's slip in it, and the tower had come down two winters before the printed date. Margit laughed until she had to sit on a block of masonry. 'So we carved a mistake into the stone,' she said. 'Good. Someone in three hundred years will have to argue with it.'

The rain started again before she reached the gate, and by morning the ochre had washed into the grooves, so the date was only there for anyone who knew to look for the cuts.