Black blackletter tattoo of the numerals 1989 on an ankle, with an ornamental tattoo visible on the hand above, beside white sneakers.

1989 in blackletter on an ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a close view of a person's ankle with the numerals 1989 tattooed in a black blackletter typeface. The ink is solid black with clean, even linework and no visible colour. An ornate, symmetrical tattoo with a mandala-like pattern is partly visible on the hand, and the ankle sits beside a white sneaker on a dark leather surface.

Lettering Ankle Hand Numeral Mandala Ornamental pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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Your mother says you have stopped writing to the greenhouse people, so I am taking up the pen myself before the frost gets into the ink. The Bramley over the south wall has finally set fruit, eleven of them, all lopsided, which is more than it managed through the whole of the eighties. I dug up the old stake you hammered in the spring of 1989 and found the biscuit tin still tied to it with baler twine. You were proud of that year. You said it was the year the ground stopped being ours and started being yours.

The garden isn't sold yet. The solicitor in Market Harbour keeps sending letters with the figures in bold, and I keep putting them under the teapot. Mrs Abernathy from number twelve has offered to take the rhubarb, which is generous and wrong, because rhubarb needs someone who sulks at it.

Then this morning I went into the shed for the spade and found your seed box on the bench, the card gone soft at the corners, Thornfield Early Runner printed in that heavy black lettering they used to favour, sealed 1989. Half of them still show green when I press them into damp cotton. I have sown a row along the path. Nothing has come up yet, which is the sensible answer.

Come and see it before they put up the fence. Bring the good secateurs, the ones you never returned. Bring the tin too, if you still have the key.

Yours, Aunt Vi