Two pens, seven columns, and not one number

Seven columns, ruled by hand, each headed by an empty box. No day names, no numbers — just tally strokes in biro. Two or three strokes in the first few columns. Seven, then nine, in the middle. One each at the end. Two different pens did the counting.

Nobody sat down and decided to start a tally. Somebody just started making a mark every time it happened, and then somebody else did too.

What is actually being counted here?

An event nobody in the house would normally think to count, until counting it became the only way to answer a question without guessing.

The strokes don't say what the event was, and the sheet doesn't need to — it only needs to record that it happened, and how often, on each of seven days running. A tally is the crudest possible instrument and also the fastest one: no app to open, no field to fill in, just a line added to a column already open on the counter.

Why are there two different pens?

Because two people in the household were keeping the same count without arranging to.

Nobody assigned the job. One person started marking a box because they happened to be there for it; someone else picked up wherever the first pen had stopped, in their own ink, without discussing it. The two pens aren't a system — they're evidence that more than one person cared enough to notice and write it down, which a single tidy column wouldn't show.

Why do the middle columns matter more than the others?

Because seven and nine strokes, sitting between columns of two or three, are legible as the worst days without a single figure being written anywhere.

A count like this works as a shape before it works as data. Thin at both ends, dense in the middle — that pattern reads at a glance, the way a plateau in a row of weights does: not because either sheet explains itself, but because a run of marks in a row shows its own shape without needing a caption.

Why leave the columns unlabelled?

Because the people who kept the tally already know what it's counting, and the shape is the part worth printing.

Day names and totals would turn the sheet into a chart built to be read by a stranger, which isn't what it was for. Strokes only, seven equal columns, is closer to what actually sat on the counter — a running mark, not a finished report. Leaving the numbers off is also what keeps the print about the household's own week rather than about one specific animal's specific problem.

What was the tally actually for?

Something to hand over, not something to keep private.

A memory of "it happened a lot that week" is easy to talk yourself out of. A tally isn't — seven strokes in a column is a fact, written down as it happened rather than reconstructed afterwards, and it travels the same way the video kept for the vet does: recorded so that somebody else, later, doesn't have to take anyone's word for it. Whether the count itself means anything is the vet's question, not this sheet's.

Does a tally like this replace a written diary?

No — it does a narrower job than a fuller record kept meal by meal does, and that's what makes it useful. A tally answers exactly one question — how many times — fast enough to be kept up in real time, on a page already open on the counter, by whoever happens to be walking past.

Does this belong to anyone but the household that made it?

No. Seven ruled columns and a run of tally strokes is about as plain a format as exists, and the only thing that makes any one sheet worth printing is whose count it actually is.

Does it print well?

Yes — tally strokes are close to the simplest mark this material can carry.

Straight biro strokes hold their edge at any size, and the two inks translate cleanly into two slightly different tones of the same colour rather than two full colours, which keeps the print to one ink and the sheet's plainness intact. Bone, oatmeal or pale grey all read as the right kind of counter-top paper.

How do I get one made?

Describe the week at JustOG — what was being counted, and how the days actually ran. 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.

Seven columns, two pens, and a box at the top of an eighth that never got started.