Letters O and C on the ankles

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two small single-letter tattoos, an O on one leg and a C on the other, sit just above the ankles of a person in white sneakers standing on sand. The letters are drawn in thin black linework with little or no shading and look slightly soft on the skin. Warm sunlight and a long shadow across the sand fill the frame, with the white shoes as the brightest element.

Fine line Lettering Ankle Sneaker Sand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have a sewing needle in one hand and a bottle of Indian ink in the other, and Dessie keeps laughing at the shake in your wrist. It is the last Saturday before Hollin Pit sends up its final cage, and half of Ridley Row has walked down to the dunes to pretend the coal dust is not following them. The sand is hard-packed where the tide has been. Dessie has already had his done, a neat blue cross on the back of his hand, and he says a letter on the ankle hurts less because nobody looks at ankles in a pit.

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You mean to do an O first, for Oswald, who went down the shaft at fourteen and never once complained of the cold. The circle comes out lopsided, like a bruise healing. You blow on it and it looks back at you, pale and a bit guilty. Then it is the C's turn, for Carrick, who taught you to whistle through a blade of grass and then sailed for Canada on the cheap boat without a word. The second letter is steadier. Dessie holds your foot up to the light and says that's the one, that's the one that'll last.

Your white plimsolls stay on the sand beside you, the leather gone the colour of bread crust from a summer of stamping through Northumberland. By four the shadow of the pithead wheel has stretched right across the beach. You rub the ink with your thumb until it softens into the skin, and the letters look smaller than they did in your head.

When the tide turns you pull the laces tight and walk up the path without looking back. Behind you the sand takes your footprints one by one, and the O and the C go with them, soft at the edges, as if the sea has only borrowed them.