Line drawing flash design of a ribboned banner reading I solemnly swear I am up to no good, above a trail of black footprints.

Banner quote with footprint trail

Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a scroll banner with curled ribbon ends, carrying the words I solemnly swear and I am up to no good in a serif typeface. Below it, a diagonal trail of solid black footprints runs down to the lower right. The design is outlined in fine brown-black linework on a plain cream background, with no shading beyond the solid footprints.

Footprint Banner Ribbon Scroll Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every night the floor of Ward Six wore a trail of footprints, and every morning the cleaners swore at them. Arthur Pell, who had carried the keys for the night shift for thirty-one years, knew they were not dirt. They were the prints of a small boot, the sole ridged like a tractor tyre, and they ran from the lift doors past the sluice and the drinks machine, ending under the far window where the blind was always half up.

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The old sisters said the building had a mischief in it, the way old houses had damp. When a porter found the trail he was to say the words they had taught him, I solemnly swear, and then follow the prints without looking back at the nurses' station. Pell thought this was nonsense until the night the corridor lights blew one after another, like someone walking ahead of him and switching them off.

He followed the prints down to the linen room. Behind the bottom shelf, where nobody had cleared in a decade, a loose board lifted. Under it sat a biscuit tin, and in the tin was a map drawn on the back of an old drug chart, the corridors marked with tiny feet. Along the bottom, in pencil, someone had written I am up to no good, and beneath that, in a round careful hand, Nurse Hale's boy, seven, waiting for Mum to finish her shift.

Pell did not tell the matron. He put a packet of custard creams on the windowsill that night, and in the morning there were fresh prints in the dust going back the other way, and the biscuits were gone.