Inner forearm tattoo of grey footprints and handprints, each set labelled with a script name and small blue hearts, in a soft realistic style.

Footprints and handprints with script names on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Three sets of small footprints and handprints are stacked down the inner forearm, each set labelled with a script name. The prints are shaded in soft grey with a textured, realistic finish, while the lettering and small heart shapes are outlined in fine black and blue linework. The design is shown straight on against a pale blue padded surface, with the skin evenly lit.

Lettering Forearm Footprint Script Heart Name

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every August my uncle Brian pressed the visiting children's feet into the clay path at the bottom of Hollis orchard, because the pickers' wives swore it kept the wasps off the Bramleys. I was nine the year he let me do the heels myself. He carried a biscuit tin of wet clay and a bucket of rainwater, and he set me on an upturned crate so I could reach the path where the windfalls rotted into the ruts.

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"Soft hands," he said, and showed me how to press the heel first, then the ball of the foot, then the little row of toes like someone counting out coppers. Each child wrote their name on a wooden lolly stick and pushed it into the edge of the clay beside their prints. Isaiah wanted his in capitals. Alan drew a small heart next to his. Seth, who was the youngest and had gone quiet on the drive up, asked if the rain would wash him out, and my uncle told him the path had never once let a name go.

The clay took a fortnight to set. We weren't allowed to walk the bottom row until the pickers had gone back to the city, and by then the sticks had gone grey and the prints had filled with leaf mould. In October the first hard frost cracked the surface into small plates, and I went down with a trowel to lift the old tin. Under the lid was a list in my uncle's square hand, every name since 1958, and a space left at the bottom for whoever came next. Years later I brought my own daughter back to the orchard. She stood in one of the old heel marks and laughed, because her boots were a size bigger than any print on the path, and the clay had kept every one of them the same.