A green and yellow four-leaf clover tattoo with black swirling linework sits on the side of an ankle, with pink toenails and green satin in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four-leaf clover with swirls on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A four-leaf clover, filled in green and yellow-green, is framed by black swirling tendrils that curl around the clover and trail down the ankle. The black outlines are smooth and even, and the colour is solid with soft shading in the leaves. The tattoo sits off-centre on the ankle, with the foot and green satin fabric filling the rest of the frame.

Botanical Ankle Clover Four-leaf clover Swirl Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost came early that year and stayed in the top field until the middle of February, so the ewes had to be fed from the hay barn twice a day. My grandfather, Owen Pryce, walked the headland with a bucket of sugar beet pulp and never once looked down at the ground he was walking on. I was the one who looked. Ten years old and bored of the lambing shed, I crouched by the gate to watch the stubble for anything green.

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It was in the gateway, under a clump of rushes gone grey with rime, that I found it. Four leaves, each one heart-shaped and dark as a bottle, with a pale yellow eye at the centre where the stalks met. I carried it to him in my mitten like a stolen egg. He took it between two fingers and held it up against the white sky, then he told me the rhyme his mother used to say: one leaf for faith, one for hope, one for love, and the last for luck, which you could only get by stumbling on it.

We pressed it flat in the feed ledger, between the pages where the tally of the ewes ran down in pencil. That spring the lambing went well, and he wrote each count in the margin beside a little curling line he drew without thinking, a stem that swirled off the edge of the page the way the frost had curled across the kitchen window. He never said he was counting his luck. He didn't need to.

He died the following winter, and the top field went under snow before anyone thought to bring the ewes down. When I finally opened the ledger, the clover had left a faint green shadow on the paper. Beside it, in his square capitals, he had written one word: FOUND.