Small dotwork tattoo of four dots in blue, pink, orange and grey in a diagonal line on the ankle, below a denim jeans cuff.

Four coloured dots on an ankle

Dotwork · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A small row of four solid dots runs diagonally across the skin, in blue, magenta, orange and dark grey from top left to bottom right. The dots are evenly sized and spaced, with clean edges and no shading. They sit on pale skin just above the ankle, with a denim jeans cuff at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Ankle Dot Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Harold Pask had run the Cannon Street press for thirty-one years and had never let a sheet leave the building with the guide dots still showing. Every job began the same way: four small circles printed in the bottom margin, blue, magenta, orange and a grey that was really black thinned with water. If the dots sat one on top of the other, the plates were true. If they drifted, somebody got a telling-off and a reprint.

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That spring the apprentice was Ruth Ashdown, quick with the ink knife but forever looking at the margins instead of the picture. "They're only guides," Harold said. "Nobody reads a guide." She said the dots looked like a train running one stop at a time, with the grey one always at the back as the last carriage. He told her to trim them off before the bundles went out, and she said she would, and she never did.

The last job came in the week the building was sold for scrap: eighty wedding invitations for a couple from the flats across the road, cream card, gold foil that Harold swore would not behave. They ran the final sheet at half past eleven on a Thursday night. The blue had slipped a hair off the line, so the magenta sat a little proud of it. Harold reached for the spoilt pile, but Ruth had already tucked that sheet into her jacket.

"It's a bad sheet," he said.

"It's the only honest one," she said. "You can see where everything was trying to get to."

He walked her to the bus stop in the rain, and when he got home he found the four dots pressed faintly through the lining of his coat, where the paper had been folded against him all the way down the hill.