Black and white photo of a solid black lightning bolt tattoo on the side of an ankle, with a hand holding the foot on a carpeted floor.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lightning bolt on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black lightning bolt sits on the outer side of an ankle, with its zigzag edges clearly defined. The photograph is black and white, with a hand gripping the foot from above and a dark background that draws attention to the skin. The bolt is the only design element, set against smooth, lit skin on a carpeted floor.

Ankle Lightning bolt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy Pask had mended the lightning rod on St Edmund's spire every spring since her father's knees gave out, and in all that time the church had never once lost its tip to the sky. Stannow lay flat across the marsh, and the spire was the only thing taller than the poplars for three miles, so the weather went for it the way a dog goes for a dropped glove. She kept a ledger in the vestry drawer. Each strike got a line, a date, and a little black zigzag drawn with the same nib her father had used for the tithe accounts.

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Her brother Alf thought the ledger morbid. "It's a rod, Dot, not a ghost story," he said, stirring his tea at the kitchen table while thunder rolled over the fens like a cart on cobbles. "You don't need to keep count."

The storm came in on a Thursday, sudden as a slammed door. She climbed the iron ladder with copper tape in her apron and the wind pulling at her sleeves, and she got as far as the louvres before the sky went white. The bolt did not touch the spire. It came down across the marsh instead and split the old ash by the lych gate from crown to root, and for a moment every headstone in the churchyard stood out bright as chalk.

When she came down, the ash was smoking and the rod was whole. She opened the ledger by the vestry lamp and found her father's last entry, from before she was born, the same little zigzag in faded brown. Beside it she drew a new one, a little crooked, and left it to dry on its own.