Fine line black script lettering tattooed on the inner ankle of a woman wearing tan sandals with gold cuffs and rolled denim jeans.

Fine line script on an ankle, with sandals

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a woman's legs in rolled-up light blue jeans and tan leather sandals with gold metal ankle cuffs. A small black tattoo of thin, cursive script sits on the inner ankle and foot, and the word is not fully clear at this resolution. The tattoo is in black ink with fine, even linework, and the background is softly blurred outdoor pavement and greenery.

Fine line Lettering Ankle Script Lettering Word Sandal Denim

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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

The wax is already softening when the tablet reaches you, and the courier is shifting from foot to foot in the doorway of the bakehouse, impatient for the seal. You have written forty letters this month for men who cannot write and women who will not let anyone else hold the stylus, and every one ends with the same tangle of requests. This one wants only a single word at the bottom, below the greeting and the price of grain, and the widow who dictated it would not say what the word was for.

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She sat on the stool with her hands folded, and the word came out of her slowly, as though it had been carried a long way. You wrote it in a thin, looping hand, the letters running into one another like river weed. When you looked up she was watching the lamp instead of you. Eight years since the boat went down off the Rhine mouth, she had told you, and the word had sat in her mouth the whole time, waiting for a messenger who could carry it across the water.

You pressed the stylus flat and smoothed the tablet so the strokes would not catch. The courier took the wax without reading it, which is how it should be. Later, when the lamp is out and the street has gone quiet, you will think about the line you drew beneath the greeting, fine as a hair, and wonder whether anyone in Gaul will ever know what it means. You will not ask. Some words are only carried.