Black fine line flame tattoo on a calf above a thin line tattoo on the shin, with black platform ankle boots in the foreground.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black platform boots with tattooed legs

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A pair of legs in black platform ankle boots with buckle straps and a chunky lug sole, shown against a plain white background. A black flame-like ornamental tattoo sits on the lower leg, and a thin single black line runs across the shin above it. The image is in black and grey with no colour ink, and the boots are the main focus of the composition.

Fine line Calf Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Fenwick had mended shoes on Harbour Row for thirty-one years, and she had never once been asked for a sole like the one lying on her bench that Tuesday. It was a lug sole, deep as a bread crust and ridged for mud, bolted to a heel the height of a tin of beans. Somebody had stitched a harness of black buckles across the upper and then, by the look of the scuffs, had walked the length of the pier in them until the paint on the toe caps split.

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Her nephew Danny brought the pair in from the lost property box at the bus station, where they had sat for a fortnight. He said the ticket clerk swore they were cursed. Ada said cursed was what people called a thing they had not paid to fix. She turned one boot over and found a small brass plate on the inside of the ankle, scratched with a single flame, the sort of flame that might be inked on a shin and carried about town for years.

She spent the whole of Wednesday on the left heel. She replaced the buckle pins, reset the rivets, and stitched a new welt along the edge where the sea air had rotted the thread. When she was done the boots stood on the counter like a pair of small, stern lighthouses. Danny asked whether she would post them back. Ada wrapped them in brown paper, copied an address off the ticket onto the parcel, and kept the brass plate in her apron pocket, because it seemed a shame to leave a flame with nowhere to burn.