Fern sprig and small lettering on ankles
Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo
A close shot of two ankles and a hand resting on brown trousers, with pink clog mules on the feet. The right ankle carries a small black fern sprig in simple linework, and the left ankle has small dark lettering reading HARVARD with a tiny circular mark beside it. The ink is black and grey against warm skin, and the composition is cropped tightly around the legs on a pale grey floor.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Mrs Pickles had danced the hornpipe in those clogs until her knees gave out, and she left them to me with a sprig of fern pressed flat inside the left one. The frond was dry as tissue and crackled when I slid my foot in. I was nineteen, and the Starlight Rooms had never once let a girl from the dye works near the stage, so I took the sprig out, thought better of it, and tucked it back under the strap.
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The band started at eight. The caller's voice cracked over the fiddles, and my heel came down on the first beat, the wooden sole ringing off the boards like a dropped spoon. I kept my weight low, the way she'd told me, the way a fern keeps its shoulders down under a wall, and by the second turn the whole hall was clapping in time with me instead of the fiddles. Nobody asked where I'd learned it. Nobody needed to.
When the set ended I bent to ease the clog off and found the fern had come loose and flattened itself against the sole, a green smear gone brown in the grain. I worked it free with a thumbnail. Mrs Pickles would have wanted it kept, I think, or thrown on the fire, and I couldn't decide which.
I left it on the boards by the piano. Let the next girl find it and wonder who had been dancing on the moor.
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