Black line tattoo of a hanging sign reading Gone to Market on the top of a foot, in a simple fine line style.

Gone to Market sign on the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A hanging wooden-style sign reading Gone to Market is drawn in black outline on the upper foot, with a small hook and two suspension lines above it. The linework is clean and even, with simple hatching inside the sign and no shading elsewhere. The tattoo is shown in black ink on pale skin against a dark plastic sheet, with the toes in the foreground.

Fine line Lettering Other Sign Text Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's loose. Sit by the fire where the old men can't cough over you. Now, you'll have heard the board on the hut door at Harrow's Gap squeaking in the wind, and you'll have wondered why a sign still says what it says when no one has lived up there for forty winters. Listen.

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Ada Pennock hung that board the morning she walked down to the valley fair with her two geese in a basket and her dead husband's silver watch sewn into her hem. She hung it on two strings, because a single cord would have frayed on the ridge wind. She painted GONE TO MARKET in tar across the planks and was proud of the letters, though the N leaned like a drunk man on a fence. Then she went down the path and the mist took her.

The surveyor from the lowland company came up the pass that autumn, a thin man with a brass compass who wanted the hut for his instruments. He read the sign, laughed, and sat on the step to wait. He waited three days. On the fourth he pulled the board down to use as kindling, and the next morning he found it back on its hook, turned to face the wall, and the strings knotted twice. He left the hut alone after that and went home by the long road.

Every spring since, someone has come up the pass and tied a fresh ribbon beneath the board. Red one year, grey the next, once a child's hair ribbon with a bell on it. Nobody knows who ties them. The shepherds say she's still at the fair, buying geese, and that she'll be back when the sign says otherwise. So the board stays. The ribbons get longer. And the wind goes on reading it aloud.