Black lettering tattoo in a handwritten style on the top of a foot, reading Gone to market, Be back soon, Love, Pig.

Handwritten note tattoo on the top of a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of the top of a bare foot with three lines of tattooed text in a casual, handwritten script: Gone to market, Be back soon, and a sign-off reading Love, Pig. The lettering is set in fine black linework on pale skin, with the lines staggered across the foot. The background is plain and soft, with the toes visible at the bottom of the frame.

Lettering Other Text Handwriting Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guard at Halse Ford had never learned his letters, so every Thursday he took the sow's paper from her harness, turned it the right way up, and pretended to study it. Gone to market. Be back soon. Love, Pig. The hand was round and careful, the hand of someone patiently taught, and he trusted it the way he trusted the river, which was to say he kept one eye on it.

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The sow belonged to Maud Corran on the far bank, a widow with a crooked apple orchard and a temper like wet kindling. Nettle had come to the farm as a runt and had grown into the cleverest creature in the valley. Each market morning she walked the ford road with a basket of eggs strapped across her back, and each market evening she came home with the basket full of thread, salt and two bent nails. Maud never asked how the sow managed it. She only said that a good pig was worth three bad husbands and cheaper to feed.

One Thursday the guard closed his hut early and followed her. She trotted through the cattle pens and past the wool stalls, stopped at the stall of a one-eyed bookbinder, and nudged a coin across the boards with her snout. The bookbinder slid back a folded sheet. Nettle read it, nodded, and tucked it into her harness beside the others. The guard understood then that the notes went both ways, and that the sow had been writing to someone for years.

He crossed back before dark, a little ashamed of himself. The following week the paper came through the gap in the hedge as usual, and when he unfolded it there was one more line in the same round hand, pressed hard enough to dent the page. Mind the ford, Tom. Love, Pig.