Two photos of black ink tattoos: a small cross on the ankle and the words Proverbs 31:25 in script on the top of the foot.

Cross on ankle and script on foot

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The image is a two-panel collage. The top panel shows a small, solid black cross on the outer ankle against a bed with striped bedding, and the bottom panel shows the words Proverbs 31:25 in black script across the top of a bare foot. Both tattoos use clean, even black linework with no shading, and the plain skin and neutral backgrounds keep the focus on the ink.

Fine line Lettering Ankle Other Cross Script Bible verse Text Foot

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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

Right, shush now, the band's only having a fag, so you've time for this. There was a seamstress called Nell Farrow who kept a back room above the Co-op, and every Saturday the dance hall at the top of Carr Lane sent her their trousers and frocks to mend. Nobody thought much of her. She wore grey and kept a small cross on a thread at her ankle, under her stocking, where the vicar could not see it and the gossips could not either.

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Her mother had told her that a woman's worth was in what she could carry, and Nell took this to mean hems. She let out waists for the bandleader's wife, she turned a collar three times for a boy who was off to Malaya, and she never once asked anybody to pay her what she was owed. The dance hall ran on her stitching, you see, and on her quiet, and that was the first thing the men of the town forgot.

Then came the night the roof leaked over the floor and the whole winter's dresses were soaked through. The committee sat in the cloakroom wringing their hands. Nell walked in with a bolt of blue serge under one arm and said, "Get the lamps lit, somebody. Strength and honour, that's what the cloth is for." She cut and stitched until the sun came up, and when the first girl twirled out in a coat she had made from a dozen ruined skirts, the whole hall went quiet.

Nobody can tell you for certain she laughed that night, but I've been told she did, in the back room with the window open and the cold coming in. That's the end of it. She rejoiced, as the good book says, in the time to come, and the time to come was the next Saturday, when the band struck up and everyone danced in what she'd made them. Off you go now.