Black and white photo of a foot with a black block-lettering quote tattoo on the ankle, partly cropped at the edge of the frame.

Block lettering quote on ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on a textured carpet, with a black block-lettering quote on the outer side of the ankle and lower leg. The top line reads YOU ARE HIS PORTION and the second line reads HE IS OUR PRIZE, though the first line is partly cut off by the frame. The photograph is in greyscale, with solid black ink, soft shadows and a plain background of a door and carpet.

Lettering Ankle Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are standing at the gate of your grandfather's allotment with the key still warm from your fist, the solicitor's letter folded in your back pocket where it keeps bending. Four rows of leeks, a shed that leans like it has been drinking, and a bench nobody has sat on since March. Your cousins are already walking the perimeter in their good shoes, counting the water butt and the greenhouse panes on their fingers, because the will split the house and the savings three ways and left the plot to you alone.

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Nobody asks why. Your uncle wants to know whether the council would buy it back, and your aunt wants to know whether the shed is insured, and you say nothing, because the answer is on a card taped inside the shed door in his square capitals. It reads THE GROUND IS YOUR PORTION. THE LEEKS ARE MY PRIZE. Beneath it is a list of what to sow in April, in biro gone brown, and the last entry has been crossed out with one firm line, the way he crossed out anything he had finished with.

You take the fork from its nail and walk to the bed where the runner beans climbed their canes every August for thirty years. The soil is dark and cold and gives under your boot. A blackbird watches from the fence with the particular suspicion of a bird that has been fed by one man for a long time. Behind you the cousins' car starts, idles, and pulls away down the lane without anyone waving.

You drive the fork in and lever the soil over, and find a worm as fat as a pencil. You leave it where it is. Then you kneel on the damp sacking, tear open the packet of beans he saved in a jam jar, and press the first one into the earth with your thumb, deep enough that the blackbird will have to wait.