Black and white photo of a fine line script tattoo reading believe on the ankle, with a bare foot resting on wooden floorboards.

Believe script on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the word believe written in a thin, flowing handwritten script across the ankle and top of the foot. The linework is fine and even, in solid black ink with no shading. The image is black and white, with the soft grey tones of the skin and the wooden floor framing the tattoo at a close angle.

Fine line Lettering Ankle Believe Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the sawdust, because the last of the Halloran Brothers' Travelling Marvels is a long tale and I've only got the one voice left. Old Mr Peel, who ran the big top for forty years, used to say the trouble with a dying circus is that everyone can see the canvas patches from the road. What nobody could count was the word he painted on the ring-wall every spring in his own loopy hand: believe. He said it was for the children. It was really for him.

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That last winter, in a field outside Stockport, the ringmaster sold the elephant to a farm in Wales and the wagons sat rotting behind a sugar beet plant. Only Nell Harrow, who was eleven and walked the wire barefoot, still turned up each morning to practise. She strung the rope between two ash trees, climbed up with a bucket of wet rags to steady herself, and fell, and climbed again. Her father had gone off to the mills. Her mother kept the accounts in a tin box. Nobody told Nell it was over, so she never noticed it was.

On the thirty-first day she made it across. Only three steps, but the rope held, and she stood at the far tree staring at her own feet as if they belonged to someone braver. She wrote the word on the back of an old ticket with a stub of pencil and nailed it to the ash.

Nobody came to see it. The field was full of rain. But the next spring a boy from the beet works found the ticket, carried it to the far tree, and tried the rope himself. That is how you keep a circus going, my loves. Not with canvas. With one word and somebody willing to fall off the wire.