Small black ink symbol with a loop and crossed strokes on the top of a foot, with a shell anklet and pale green toenails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black symbol tattoo on the top of a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the top of a bare foot with a small black symbol made of a loop, an arrow-like stroke and a few short cross marks. The lines are solid and even, and the design is shown in black on pale skin against a wooden floor. The composition is centred on the foot, with a silver chain anklet decorated with shell discs in the lower frame.

Other Symbol Foot Anklet Shell Toenails

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harriet Venn kept the lamps along Tallow Wharf for forty winters, and she knew every cellar arch in the lower town by its mark. Soot on the stone, a loop with a straight stroke running through it and angled down to the right, with three short crosses set beneath like nails in a board. Her mother had shown her the sign when she was small. It meant the way out was on the river side, not the street side.

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One November night the fog came up off the Skelder so thick a man could not see his own boots. A boy called Piet ran to her hut with a lantern gone dark and a cough that rattled in his chest. His father, he said, had gone down the steps behind the sailmaker's to fetch a coil of rope and had not come back up. Harriet took her pole, her tin of soot and a hand lamp with a good wick, and went down the wharf. Every arch looked the same in fog. Men walked in circles there, sometimes all night, and some walked into the water.

She marked each arch as she passed, drawing the loop and the long arrow, but she turned the arrow so it pointed up the steps toward the lamps. At the foot of the last stair she found the sailmaker's son sitting on a bollard, soaked to the knees and laughing at himself. He had been round the same pillar four times. He said he had followed a sign that kept pointing at the sky, and he had thought someone was playing a joke on him.

Harriet walked him up the stairs by the arrows, one after another, the soot still tingling faintly on her thumb. By morning the gulls and the rain had worn most of the marks away, but the three crosses held on the stone. The boys of Tallow Wharf still touch them on the way home for luck, though none of them remember who first drew them.