A roman numeral in the date removes one argument

14. iii. 26., written enormous, in thick black fountain-pen strokes, straight across the chest.

A full stop after the day. A full stop after the roman numeral. A full stop after the year.

That is not fussiness. It is the format that was correct when she learned it, and it still is.

Why does she write the month as a roman numeral instead of a number?

Because a roman numeral cannot be misread as a day, and a plain number can.

Write 03/04/2026 and half the world reads the third of April, half reads the fourth of March — day-first and month-first conventions disagree, and the date itself gives no clue which one was used. Swap the month for iii and the ambiguity is gone: nobody has ever written a day as a roman numeral, so the numeral can only mean March. Two numbers and one word, in a fixed order, settle the question without either party needing to know which country wrote it.

Where does this format come from?

From whichever office first put a date form in front of her and corrected her until the stops were in the right places — a school register, a service record, a ledger she kept for work.

Day, roman month, year, each closed off with a full stop, sat inside a wider way of writing that was taught as the way, not offered as one option among several. Getting every stop in was part of getting the date right. Nobody at the time would have called it a system. It was just how a date was written, the same way everyone in a room was taught to hold a pen the same way.

What job is the full stop doing?

Marking where one part of the date ends and the next begins — the same job a forward slash does in 03/04/2026, except a slash carries no information about order and a stop after a roman numeral does not need to.

Drop the stops and 14 iii 26 still parses, because the roman numeral is doing the work of removing the ambiguity by itself. Drop the roman numeral and keep the stops, and the date is back to being as unreadable as any other, just with more punctuation. The numeral carries the meaning; the stops are the habit of precision that came bundled with it.

Whose permission do you need to print someone's handwriting?

Hers — it is her hand and her convention, and the question that matters is whether she would want to see it on a shirt rather than folded into a diary where she has always kept it.

Nobody owns a date format and nobody owns a roman numeral. The only thing in this design that belongs to a specific person is the exact date and the exact slant of the strokes, and both of those belong to whoever wrote them. Asking first is not a legal step so much as the difference between a shirt she laughs at and one that feels like being filed without being consulted.

Does this work for a date that is not a birthday?

Yes — a wedding date, a demobilisation date, the day a shop first opened, in whatever format the person who lived through it used at the time.

The design does not care what the date marks, only that it is written the way the person who owns it would write it themselves. A date copied off a certificate in modern numerals says less than the same date copied out of the letter she sent that week, stops and roman numeral intact — which is close to what carving a line straight into the fabric is doing with a different kind of permanence.

What if your own family never used roman numerals?

Then this is not your shirt to copy — print the format your own household used, stops or slashes or none at all, rather than borrowing hers because it photographs well.

A signature still being learned wanders because the hand has not settled yet. Hers stopped moving decades ago and was never wrong to begin with — the two are opposite ends of the same idea, not the same design worn by two different people.

Does it print well?

Yes — a handful of thick, single-colour strokes on a plain field are close to the simplest thing a screen print reproduces, and fountain-pen ink already has the hard edge the process wants.

Keep the numerals and the roman letters at the size they were written, not stretched to fill the chest, and the small variation stroke to stroke is what keeps it reading as handwriting rather than a typeface pretending to be one. One ink is enough. A pale ground — bone, oatmeal, stone — keeps a dark ink legible without needing a second colour to hold it together.

How do I get one made?

Describe the date and the exact format at JustOG — day, month notation, punctuation, and the slant of the hand that wrote it. 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.

Six characters and three full stops, and every one of them is doing a job.