Fine line script tattoo on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests on a white trainer with black stripes, and a thin black tattoo of script-like lettering or abstract strokes sits on the ankle. The linework is delicate and unshaded, in black ink only. The close, top-down shot on white bedding also shows a grey knit sleeve, black nail polish and gold rings.

Fine line Ankle Script

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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

You learned the lock at Harrow Mill the winter the ice came down the cut, when your father's barge, the Marigold Lass, sat wedged against the gate with her paint going grey. Your father was ashore with a fever and a cough that wouldn't lift, so the rope was yours, and the lockkeeper, a thin man called Ambrose Pell, watched you from his hut as if you might drop it.

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Pell kept a slate by his door where he chalked the levels each morning. He wrote with his left hand, loops and hooks that ran into each other like wet reeds, and nobody could read them but him. One dawn you asked what the marks said. He told you they were the river's own handwriting, the names it gave itself between floods, and that anyone who learned to read them could always find the way through.

You didn't believe him until the gate sealed and the water fell away beneath the hull in one long breath. You stood on the coping with the slush soaking through your boots and copied the strokes onto the back of your hand with a stub of pencil, sloping and unbroken, the way Pell did. The line of the river ran out ahead of you, pale under the thaw.

When your father got up at last, he asked what the water had told you. You showed him the marks. He turned your hand over, read nothing, and laughed until he coughed. Pell read it, though. He nodded once and said the river had been waiting a long while for someone to take its dictation.