Black script tattoo reading Allons-y on the top of a foot near the ankle, with blue bow flats and dark jeans visible.

Allons-y script tattoo on the foot

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph from above of two feet in blue bow-front flat shoes and dark denim jeans, standing on a gravel surface. A black script tattoo reading Allons-y with a looping flourish sits on the top of one foot, close to the ankle. The lettering uses smooth, even linework in dark grey-black ink, and the composition centres the tattoo against the pale skin.

Lettering Ankle Script Lettering Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came over the hill the week the river froze, eleven wagons and a carousel with one painted horse missing its ear. Old Marta Vossen kept the ledger of who had paid for what, and every morning at first light she said the same word, not loudly, the way you would wake a sleeping dog. Allons-y, she told the mules. Allons-y, she told the boy asleep under the big wheel. Then they went.

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Her grandson Tobin never liked the word. To him it was a word for leaving, and leaving was what the fair did to towns. It took the coins and the bread and left the ash of its fires behind. One autumn, at a village called Cold Maple, he asked her why they could never stop. She walked him to the carousel and showed him the lettering curled in gold across the canopy, the same word, worn pale by rain. A word painted on a wagon, she said, is only a promise you make to yourself each morning, and the road is where you keep it.

The winter Marta took ill and the fair stayed put in the frost, Tobin took the ledger and the team and drove the route alone. At every crossroads he stood up on the box and called the word out across the empty fields. The towns that had turned their backs on them came out to watch, and some of them followed the wagons a mile before turning home.

He reached the sea road in the thaw and found his grandmother already sitting on the steps of the next booth, boots worn through at the heel, a cup of tea going cold beside her. You walked ahead, he said, and you never told me. She smiled and tipped the ledger toward him. I said it for you every morning, she said. You only had to hear it.