Black and grey traditional tattoo of a scroll banner reading I solemnly swear that I am up to no good, with footprints, on the upper thigh.

Footprints and scroll banner on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo on the upper thigh shows a ribbon banner wrapped around two scrolling shapes, with the words "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good" printed on the ribbon. Dotted footprints trail around the scrolls on either side. Bold outlines and light grey shading give it a classic look, and the skin is shot up close against a blurred background with a hand at the right edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The map came to me folded inside a tin of boot polish, which is how my uncle Ruben moved anything he did not want a customs man to read. The paper was the colour of stewed tea and showed the frontier at Vallen Pass in lines so fine I had to hold it to the lamp. Every track carried a trail of small dotted footprints, and in the bottom corner someone had written, in a hand like barbed wire: I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

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We went over on the first night of the thaw, Ines in front with a lace parcel strapped to her chest, me behind with the lantern shuttered. The dots glowed faintly when I breathed on the paper, then ran ahead of us along the dry stone wall and down into the culvert beneath the railway. At the guard post a torch swung across the ditch. Ines lifted her chin and began to sing a wedding song, loudly and badly, and the beam wandered off to find someone more interesting.

Halfway through the culvert the footprints stopped being ink. They were real, pressed into the silt, and each one fitted my boot exactly, the heel worn down on the left the way mine had been since I was nine. I looked at Ines. She had already seen. The map had not been drawn by Ruben at all but by my own feet, years earlier, walking the pass with a notebook and a grudge, and someone had copied the marks down so that we would always know the way home.

We came out on the far side with wet hems and no lace, because she had sold it to the guard's wife an hour before. Ines folded the map along its old creases and put it back in the tin. "Your turn to swear," she said, and I did, to the dark, and the dark did not argue.

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