Black abstract calligraphic tattoo on the side of an ankle, with a black canvas sneaker and white laces beside it.

Abstract calligraphic mark on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A single black tattoo of loose, curled strokes sits on the side of an ankle, resembling abstract script or brush marks. The linework is smooth and varies in weight, with a few tapered ends and one small solid dot. The photo is taken close up against a white sock area and a black canvas sneaker, with the ink shown in black only.

Ankle Abstract Calligraphy Swirl Script

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had thinned by the third week of the dry season, and Ilse, scribe of Carrow, was still trying to write the king's name without it bleeding into the vellum. Her master had died in the spring with his brushes still wet, and so the marking fell to her, a girl with burnt fingers and no patience for the long sweep of a royal seal.

Keep reading

On the seventh night a stranger came to the scriptorium door carrying a jar of soot and a question. He wanted to know whether a line could carry a grief without breaking. Ilse said a line could carry anything if the hand was steady, and he laughed and told her to prove it. So she took the brush and drew a curl the way the river turned at the mill, then a second stroke that fell away like a sleeve, and last a single dot where the ink pooled and would not be shaken loose.

The stranger looked at it a long time. Then he paid her in salt and walked out, and the next morning the king's seal was found cracked on the palace steps, the wax still soft from a hand nobody had seen. Ilse never learned who the stranger was, only that the drought broke three days later, the river rising over the mill-wheel in one brown rush.

The people of Carrow still say a steady hand can hold a sorrow in a few strokes, and they teach their children to finish with a dot, because the old scribes said a line left open at the end keeps walking.