Black and grey tattoo of a chain anklet with a hanging shield-shaped medallion on the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chain anklet with shield medallion

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A chain anklet with a ring clasp runs around the ankle, and a short chain drops to a shield-shaped pendant bearing a shaded figure. The chain links and ring are rendered in solid black with soft grey highlights, while the medallion uses grey shading to suggest relief and depth. The design sits centred on the ankle against a grey carpet, with the foot shown in profile.

Ankle Chain Anklet Ring Medallion Shield Figure Pendant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, and keep your voice down, the dough is still sleeping. Four in the morning in Pell's bakery on Tanner Row, and the only thing awake is the oven, grumbling like an old dog. Young Tom Harrow found the medallion on the nail above the proving drawer, a little silver shield on a chain of black links, a man on it with a spear raised over something that might have been a serpent or a bad mood. Mrs Pell had hung it there for forty years and never once said why.

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Tom asked her on the morning he meant to leave for London. He had his bundle packed under the counter and a ticket in his pocket for the Thursday coach. She didn't look up from the bannetons. 'My mother bought that off a pedlar at Ely Fair,' she said, 'for the price of one wheaten loaf. He told her it would keep a man from drowning. She thought that was nonsense, and she was right, but she wore it anyway, and I still do.' Then she pushed the lamp along the bench so he could see the saint's face, worn almost smooth by a thumb.

'Look at him properly,' she said. 'He isn't killing anything. He's turned his back on the beast and he's walking off the picture. That's the trick of it. You don't have to win the fight, Tom. You only have to know which way the door is.' Tom looked. The figure did seem to be heading away from the edge of the shield, toward the rim, toward the light.

He unpacked his bundle before the bells went. When the first batch came out, golden and cracking at the seams, Mrs Pell hung the medallion back on its nail and said nothing at all, which was, Tom would later admit, the most useful thing anyone had ever said to him.