Small blue shaded tattoo of a high heel shoe on the side of an ankle, with white highlights along the upper surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue high heel shoe on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A small high heel shoe in blue ink sits on the side of an ankle, shown in profile with the heel on the left. The shoe is shaded in several blues with pale highlights along the top of the upper and the toe, giving it a dimensional look. The skin is lightly lit against a blue fabric background, and the tattoo fills the centre of the frame.

Ankle Shoe High heel

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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

The big top at Pennock's has three poles now, and the canvas over the centre one has a patch the colour of weak tea. You are the one who mends things, so on the last Saturday in October you sit under a single bulb with a tin of blue paint and a sable brush, touching up the heel of the slipper that Madame Orla wears for the finale. Nobody else would bother. The sequins have gone, the glue has yellowed, and the audience now is mostly the same six pensioners from Ledbury who come for the warm tea urn.

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Orla comes in with her hair still pinned for the act and asks whether you can make it shine for one more week. You tell her paint can only do so much. She laughs, then stops, because the shoe sits on the trestle between you and under the lamp it looks almost like water that has decided to hold its shape. 'My mother had a pair like this,' she says, 'before the fire.' You do not ask which fire.

That night the wind takes a corner of the tent and you go out in your socks to haul the guy ropes with the stagehands. When you come back the trestle is bare. The slipper sits on the bottom step of the caravan, its heel still wet, the only thing in the field catching the moonlight. You pick it up. It is lighter than you expected and cold in the way glass is cold, and when you turn it over the blue has run into one clean line along the sole, as though someone had walked it all the way from town.

By morning the tent is down, the poles are on the lorry, and Orla is gone, leaving a note on the caravan step in her looping hand: keep the shoe, it was never going to fit anyone but you. You slide it into your coat pocket and walk toward the road, feeling its small weight knock against your side with every step.