Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ankh tattoo on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bare foot and ankle with a small, solid black ankh tattoo at the side of the ankle. The linework is clean and even, with no shading or colour. The foot sits in the lower part of the frame against a plain sandy background, leaving the tattoo as the clear focus.

Fine line Ankle Ankh Cross

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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 tide has left the cove littered with the usual things: bottle glass, a child's shoe, a rope of kelp wound round a crab pot. You kneel in the wet sand where the storm cut a channel and wait for the light to flatten, because the old men at the harbour say the sea gives back what it has taken only at low water, and only to people who stop searching for it.

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Your grandfather worked the tin levels under the headland until the water came in and the shaft was sealed. He kept a loop of brass in his waistcoat pocket, a key-shaped thing with a round top like a looking glass, and said the Egyptians wore such keys to open the door to the next life. You never believed him, and he never minded. He said belief was for the chapel, and a key was for opening things.

Your fingers find it under a hand's depth of sand, dark and cold, with a crack down one arm. It is not brass. It is iron gone soft with rust, and the loop has the same shape as his. You turn it over and the sand shifts, and for a moment the whole beach seems to lean towards you, waiting for you to decide what to do with it.

You slip it into your pocket beside his, which still rattles against the tin of your mother's sweets, and climb the path without looking back at the water. Some doors are better left shut, but a key, he always said, is only ever a promise that someone will come back to open them.