Black ink scrollwork and floral vine tattoo wrapping from the ankle across the top and side of a foot, in a fine line and blackwork style.

Black scrollwork tattoo on a foot and ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of swirling scrolls, tendrils and small leaf or flower motifs runs from the ankle up the inner side and across the top of the foot. The linework varies from fine strokes to bolder filled shapes, with dotted accents along the curves. The design is entirely black on light skin, and the photograph is taken close up from a low angle against a dark background.

Fine line Blackwork Ankle Scrollwork Vine Flower Leaf Swirl

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the gate is hung at last, though Mr Pargeter swears he'll not pay for the lamp bracket until the frost is out of the ground. I did what you told me and let the scroll run where it wanted rather than where my drawing said. The top curl went up past the hinge like a runner after light, and I let it, because the iron had its own mind by the third heat.

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Working it alone these last weeks has been strange. The bellows wheeze the same tune your father hummed, and I catch myself listening for him at the anvil. Every evening I shut the forge down and walk the long way past the Hallam Road allotments, where the bindweed has taken over the railings. I cut a sprig each time and press it between the pages of his Bewick, the one with the wren on the spine.

Yesterday the carter stopped to admire the gate and asked which pattern book I'd copied. I told him none. Two bends down from the middle there is a little flower I punched out of a scrap of copper, a bloom that never existed in any book. I hid it low, where only someone on their knees would find it, and I thought of you doing the same thing in the margins of your sketches when you were eleven.

Come home for Easter. The gate will still be there, and so will the spot where the scroll curls back on itself like a question nobody has asked yet. Bring your own tools. There is a bench waiting, and the vice still squeaks when you turn it, just as you used to tell me.