# The second one is the interesting one

> A timber face scratched over with discs of every size, on no grid, and a tally underneath that gets to fifteen and stops beside the words NOBODY COUNTED.

August 21, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/forty-marks-where-one-would-do

A dark timber face filling the back, scratched over from edge to edge with pale discs. Each one is a
circle with lines running out from its centre.

They are every size, they overlap, and they line up with nothing.

Along the bottom left, three complete groups of five strokes. Then the count stops. Beside it, small
spaced capitals: NOBODY COUNTED.

The first mark is not the interesting one. Somebody made it, looked at it, judged it insufficient —
and then made that judgement again, and again, and kept making it.

## Why is the second mark more interesting than the first?

Because the first one is a decision and the second one is a verdict on the first.

A single disc scratched into a beam is a complete act. The moment a second appears beside it, the
first has been reviewed and found not to have settled anything, and the person has gone back with the
same tool to do it again. Everything after that is the same review repeated. What covers this timber
is not one act done at scale; it is the same short act carried out dozens of times by somebody who
never reached the end of it.

## What does the absence of a grid rule out?

Ornament and plan, both at once.

Decoration lines things up — even spacing, a repeat, a border, marks of one size at one interval.
Nothing here does that. The discs sit at any angle, overlap each other's rims, and vary from a span
wider than a shoulder blade down to ones tucked into the space two larger discs left over. Each is
struck out the way [a rosette falls out of a pair of
compasses](/stories/the-six-petal-mark-on-the-beam), so the individual figure is orderly. The
arrangement of them is not, and that gap between a tidy unit and an untidy field is the whole read.

## Why do the tally strokes stop where they do?

Because they stop in a completed group of five, which is what giving up looks like rather than being
interrupted.

Counting that is broken into stops halfway through a group — two strokes, three strokes, an unfinished
gate. This one runs three full fives, gets a third of the way along the bottom of the timber and then
simply does not continue. Nothing took the person away mid-stroke. They finished a group, and at some
point after that decided the number was not worth keeping, while the marks above went on being made
regardless.

## Why is NOBODY COUNTED set right beside a count?

Because the caption and the strokes disagree, and the disagreement is the point.

Somebody did count. Fifteen strokes are cut into the bottom of the board in the same hand as
everything else. The words next to them say the opposite, which turns the tally into a record of an
attempt rather than a total, and puts the whole surface beyond arithmetic. A record can survive
without any numbers at all: [a strip of cloth knotted on to a thorn
branch](/stories/the-rag-tied-to-a-thorn-tree) reports its own age by how far the colour has
gone, with nothing written down anywhere.

## Why are the discs so many different sizes?

Because nothing was supervising the work, and unsupervised accumulation has no house size.

The largest sits left of centre and takes up nearly a third of the field. Others are half that, a
quarter of that, down to small ones pressed into whatever room the big ones left along the edges. A
scheme produces one size. A surface that was returned to over a long stretch produces this — every
mark fitted to the space available on the day it was made, which is also what [coins driven edge-on
into a fallen trunk](/stories/the-coins-hammered-into-a-fallen-trunk) look like once enough
hands have been past. Any repeated mark behaves the same way: notches, crosses, drilled holes.

## Who owns a scratched disc?

Nobody. A circle with lines out of it is not a work, and there is no author here to license from.

The figure is what a compass does, the timber is a piece of wood, and the words in the corner were
written for this design rather than copied off anything. What does have an owner is the record of a
particular marked beam — the photograph somebody took, the measured drawing in a published survey,
the transcription of a documented inscription. Those belong to whoever made them and can be licensed
like anything else, which is worth doing when one specific example is genuinely the subject. Style
has no owner. A work does.

## Does it print well?

Yes, provided the scratches are opened up and the number of them comes down.

Pale lines on a dark ground is a strong combination on fabric, but overlapping rims and radiating
spokes crowd fast: where three discs cross, lines closer together than the weave can separate merge
into a grey patch. Fewer marks, drawn heavier, hold the same read at a distance. The mottled tone of
the timber wants a handful of flat values rather than a smooth blend, for the same reason. Two inks
carry it — a bone white and a near-black — on ash grey, washed charcoal or stone. The capitals want
extra weight and letterspacing at that size, since small type is the first thing a weave closes up.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the surface at [JustOG](/) — how many marks, how far the sizes range, and what the words in
the corner say.
Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to
order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Fifteen strokes, and then the count stops. The discs carry on to the shoulder seam.