Black and grey tattoo of two baby footprints with a name in cursive script between them, shown on skin.

Baby footprints with name in script

Lettering · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two baby footprints side by side, with the toes as small dark dots above each sole. A name is written in flowing cursive script across the centre, with a thin swirling flourish trailing beneath it. The footprints are softly shaded in grey, while the lettering and toes use crisp black linework, and the design is in black and grey only.

Lettering Realism Footprint Name Script Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the night porter at Thornleigh Junction, and the last northbound has gone, leaving the platform smelling of wet coal and hot brake dust. Your broom catches on something beside the bench under the canopy, and you crouch down. Two small footprints are pressed into the concrete, their heels softened as though the cement was still tacky when somebody stepped out of it. Beside them, scratched with what must have been a hairpin, is a name: Giovanna.

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Mrs Pell, who has run the parcels office since before the lines were electrified, says the prints date from the spring of 1961, the week the platform was relaid. A foreman's little girl was left by the waiting room while her father signed for a delivery of sleepers, and she ran out onto the wet slab before anyone could stop her. Her father sent a Christmas card to the station every year for two decades, always signed with the same looping mark that looked like a train pulling away.

You find the old lost property ledger on the top shelf and turn the pages until you reach the entry. Under a column of umbrellas and single gloves, in faded pencil: one pair of small impressions, not to be removed. You think about how everything on a platform gets swept away eventually, the tickets, the crisp packets, the names on the timetable boards, except what was set down before the work was finished.

You don't sweep that corner. Instead you set an upturned bucket over the prints and write a note for the morning shift. When you return at six, the bucket has been moved to one side, and a single folded ticket, dated 1961 and stamped for a journey that no longer runs, sits in the exact centre of the heel.