Fine line black script tattoo reading explore dream discover running from the ankle along the outer side of a bare foot on sand.

Explore dream discover script on the ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on sand with the words explore, dream and discover written in a single thin black script line that runs from the ankle towards the toes. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black against the skin. The close crop centres the lettering diagonally across the foot, with a pale beach and sea horizon in the background.

Fine line Lettering Ankle Script Word Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning on Sgeir Dubh I chalked three words above the schoolroom door, the only lesson the mainland inspector ever praised. Explore, dream, discover. The children copied them into their jotters in a looping hand I had learned from a nun in Oban, and the wind off the Atlantic rattled the window sash while they worked.

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Callum Ross was the one who asked what the words were for. He was eleven and had a habit of sitting on the harbour wall at low tide, counting the boats that did not come. I told him they were a kind of map, and he said maps had lines and places in them, not verbs. I had no answer that would satisfy an eleven-year-old, so I gave him a biscuit instead.

The spring he left, the tide went out so far that the sand ran grey all the way to the skerry. He came down to the slipway with his boots tied together and slung over one shoulder. Before he climbed into the dinghy he knelt and drew in the wet sand with a stick, one line, joined up, the three words running from the high tide mark towards the water.

I watched the ferry take him out past the lighthouse. By the time the sea came back over the page, the letters had gone soft at the edges, then they were gone, and the beach was only sand again. I walked back up the path thinking it was a strange thing to have taught a child, that a word can be written in any place at all and still be waiting there, even after the water has taken it.