Neo-trad style tattoo of a beaded chain wrapping around the ankle and ending in a purple and grey fleur-style cross on the top of the foot.

Beaded chain and fleur cross on an ankle

Neo-trad · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A beaded chain runs across the ankle and down the top of the foot, ending in an ornate cross with flared, fleur-like arms. The beads and chain links are outlined in black with grey shading and highlights, while the cross is filled with purple and grey tones and has a dark centre. The photo is taken at a close angle on pale skin with a plain background.

Neo-trad Ankle Chain Bead Cross Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chain comes out of the steward's trunk on the fourteenth day south, wrapped in a handkerchief that smells of cloves and bilge. You hold it up to the lamp in the purser's cabin and the beads swing, grey as pewter, each one with a dark eye at its centre. Mr Tregaskis never said what it was for. He only said, when the fever took him off Madeira, that the cross was to go to his sister in Penzance and nobody else was to touch it.

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You count the beads in the dark because counting is what the sea gives you. Thirty-three links from the clasp to the cross. Its arms flare like the ends of a lily, and someone in a Lisbon workshop has painted them violet and picked out the edges in bone. Past the Line the ship's cat sleeps on your bunk, and you find yourself saying the names of ports under your breath, Lagos, Santa Cruz, Recife, the way his lips moved over the beads.

At Cape Town the agent asks for the effects, and you hand over the trunk, the ledger and the boots. The chain stays closed in your fist. When the bell strikes eight, you notice your palm has taken the shape of the cross, and you cannot remember when you started holding it.

In October you walk up Chapel Street with the cross buttoned inside your coat. His sister opens the door, looks at the violet arms for a long moment, and says he always did have a taste for showing off. You give her the chain and keep the last bead, the one nearest the cross, which is still warm from your hand.