Black fine line tattoo of a copyright symbol followed by the year 1981, placed on the outer ankle and heel of a light skinned person.

Copyright symbol and 1981 on an ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo reads a copyright symbol followed by the numerals 1981, set in a clean, even sans serif typeface. The lines are crisp and uniform with no shading, sitting on the outer ankle and heel against plain skin. The tattoo is centred in the frame on a blue surface, with the photo taken at close range.

Lettering Fine line Ankle Numeral Text

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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

Ellis Trewin set the tide tables by hand in the back room of the Porthgwidden printworks, and the last line of every page was the one her father fussed over. Four lines of figures, a rule of thin brass, then the ringed C and the year, pressed in the same plain face as the rest of the type so nobody could say it had been added as an afterthought.

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The men on the quay bought the sheets for a penny and folded them into their oilskins. They checked slack water against the church clock and the gulls and never once read the foot of the page, which suited Ellis fine. In the spring of 1981 a firm from Bristol wrote asking whether Porthgwidden's tables were theirs to sell, and her father laughed so hard he had to sit down on a stack of unbound paper.

He answered the letter himself, in pencil, on the back of a spoiled chart. The sea had not been printed by anyone, he wrote, and the moon did not need a licence, but the arrangement of those figures was the work of a family who had sat up through the big springs to get them right. The symbol was there so the next person would know whose sums they were. Then he sealed the envelope, and the stamp went down crooked.

Ellis still prints the tables now, on a machine that hums where the old one clanked. The brass C has a bite out of its circle where the metal wore thin, and every boat in the harbour carries that same small flaw in its pocket.