Roman Numeral Tattoo Ideas, Dates and Rules

What a roman numeral tattoo means

A Roman numeral tattoo is nearly always a date, and the date is nearly always about one person: a birth, a wedding, the day someone died, the year a child arrived. The numerals are chosen because they hide the meaning in plain sight. Almost anyone reads 1998 at a glance; very few will stop to work out MCMXCVIII, so the wearer carries a number that is public in form and private in practice.

The letterforms are the second reason. These are the capitals Rome cut into stone, and a year set in them reads as something recorded rather than something written, closer to the date on a foundation stone than to a note. They also belong to no living language, so a year in numerals reads the same in Madrid, Manila and Minneapolis, which matters to people whose family is spread across several countries.

Single numerals work differently. A lone VII, XI, XIII or XXI is usually a lucky number, a birthday, an age reached or a shirt number, and it is often chosen as much for its shape as its value. VII and XI are close to symmetrical and sit centred on the body without help; a long numeral such as XXVIII behaves like a band and wants a strip of skin to run along. The III and the IV on this page might count three siblings or four children, the size of a family rather than a day.

What the numerals do not do is explain themselves. A date tells a stranger that something happened and nothing about what, so the wearer decides each time whether to say. That privacy is most of the appeal, and it is also why the conversion has to be right: an error goes unnoticed for years, until the one person who reads numerals fluently asks what happened on a day that never existed.

Where the design comes from

The signs most likely began as tally marks rather than letters. I, V and X look like the strokes and notches of counting on a stick, and they settled into the shapes of the alphabet only later; D for five hundred started life as half of the older sign for a thousand. The Romans were not strict about subtraction, and IIII and VIIII appear in their inscriptions alongside IV and IX. The tidy rules taught now were fixed long after the empire. Clock faces kept the older IIII for four, which is why the Great Clock of Westminster, running since 1859, is noticed for using IV. The letterforms most numeral tattoos descend from are the capitals cut at the base of Trajan's Column in Rome, dedicated in 113, which Carol Twombly drew as the Trajan typeface for Adobe in 1989. The numerals survive wherever something is meant to look permanent: regnal names, film copyright lines, and the Super Bowl, which the NFL has numbered this way since 1971, except in 2016, when a lone L was judged not to work on a logo and Super Bowl 50 went out in ordinary digits.

Choosing yours

• Check the numeral against the rules before anything else. Seven letters carry the values: I is 1, V is 5, X is 10, L is 50, C is 100, D is 500 and M is 1,000. Letters run from largest to smallest and are added together. A smaller letter placed before a larger one is subtracted instead, and the rules forbid all but six such pairs: IV (4), IX (9), XL (40), XC (90), CD (400) and CM (900). No letter is repeated more than three times in a row, and V, L and D are never repeated at all. So 49 is XLIX and never IL, 99 is XCIX and never IC, 8 is VIII and never IIX, and 1999 is MCMXCIX and never MIM.
• Settle the order of the date before converting it. European dates run day, month, year and American ones month, day, year, and nothing in the numerals says which you meant: XII·IV·MCMXCVIII is 12 April 1998 in London and 4 December in New York. The raised dots come from Roman inscriptions, which put a point between words, and they are doing work rather than decorating. Run together, XIIIV could be XII and IV or XIII and V, two different days. Dots, spaces or short bars all serve, as long as the three parts are unmistakably apart.
• Numerals are harder to keep legible small than their straight strokes suggest. A run of verticals, the III in VIII or MMXVIII, closes into a single bar as ink spreads, and serifs on neighbouring letters meet and fuse. Ask for letter spacing wider than looks right on paper, with the gap between strokes at least as wide as the strokes themselves. Heavy blackletter numerals look right at size and turn into a barcode when small; a light serif or a clean sans holds better under about 5 cm.
• Count the letters before choosing where it goes, because the year sets the length and you do not. MM, for 2000, is two letters; MCMLXXXVIII, for 1988, is eleven. A wrist that holds MMXX comfortably will not hold MCMLXXXVIII at the same height, and a full date often runs to fifteen characters once the separators are counted.

Common questions