Black serif roman numerals XLIX tattooed along the side of a finger, in a lettering style on the hand.

XLIX roman numerals on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a finger bearing the roman numerals XLIX in a black, upright serif typeface. The lettering is crisp and evenly spaced, with solid black ink and no colour. A second hand enters from the right with a small dark outline tattoo on one finger, partly out of frame, and a red-painted fingernail is visible at the top of the image.

Lettering Hand Roman numeral Numeral Finger Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chalk board by the ferry steps had read XLIX since the fog came down off the Saltings, and Maud Tennant would not let the boy rub it clean. He wanted to. Every morning he stood with the rag in his fist and looked at her the way boys look at a grown woman who has gone quiet, but she only tapped the board with her knuckle and told him to fetch the tide tables instead.

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Forty-nine was the number of crossings the Mary Ellen had made before she went out past the bar with Joss Arkwright at the tiller. Maud had counted them from the landing, one stroke of chalk for each, in the Roman way her father had taught her, because the Roman way took up more room and a person could not hurry it. Forty-nine tidy strokes, a neat row, and then nothing. Joss had promised he would be back by the next spring tide. Spring tides came and went like bells in a church that had lost its congregation.

On the fiftieth morning the fog lifted and there was a sail low on the water, grey as a gull's back, coming in on the ebb. Maud did not wait for the boy. She walked down the slick steps with her skirts gathered in one fist and stood at the edge until the hull knocked against the piling. It was not the Mary Ellen. It was a yawl from Orford with a stranger at the helm who wanted to know if the ferry still ran.

Maud looked at the board, then at the stranger, and took the chalk from her apron pocket. She did not add the L. She wiped the whole row away with the side of her hand and wrote, in plain figures anyone could read, 1.