Black script reading Be the change with small floral flourishes across the top of a foot, in lettering style, shown in a photo of a bare foot with red toenail polish.

Be the change script on the foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot is shown from the side with the words Be the change written in black cursive script, with a small floral flourish at each end of the phrase. The linework is clean and solid with no visible shading, and the ink is a uniform dark grey-black. The foot fills the centre of the frame against a blurred car interior background, with the tattoo running diagonally across the top of the foot.

Lettering Other Script Flourish Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the words on the inside of the schoolroom cupboard door the morning the council man arrives with his clipboard. Someone has written them in pencil, the letters leaning like they are walking into a wind: Be the change. The paint has lifted around them, the way it does on the schoolhouse of Eilean Beag, where you learned your letters from a woman who smelled of peppermint and wet slate.

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Mr Duncan wants a signature by the Friday boat. Twelve pupils, he says, is not a school, it is a waiting room. You tell him the ferry has been cancelled three times this winter and the children do their sums on the backs of fish boxes anyway. He pushes the clipboard across the desk as though it weighs more than paper should.

That night you sit under the lamp with the tin of Indian ink your mother kept for labelling jam. You copy the lettering onto the back of the ferry timetable, slowly, the way Miss Gillies made you, loops joining where they ought to. Then you add the small curls at each end, because the pencil marks still show the old flourishes ghosting beneath the paint, and you find you cannot leave them out.

On Friday you pin the sheet to the ferry shelter and go back to the schoolhouse without waiting to see who stops. Ailsa Gunn finds it first, a bag of mussels dripping against her knee. She reads it aloud, one finger under each word, and then asks what the change is supposed to be. You tell her you will find out when the boat comes back, and you go to fetch the chalk.