Matching I hope you dance script on both feet
Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo
The image shows two bare feet, each with the phrase I hope you dance written in black cursive script across the top. The lettering uses fine to medium black linework with solid fill and follows the diagonal line of each foot. The black ink stands out clearly against pale skin, with a tiled floor and a grey garment in the background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Mind the lock gate, child, it weeps when you lean on it. Now, your great-grandmother Ada was the finest dancer on the Trent between the wars, and she had feet that never once in her life sat still. She met Tom Pickering on the towpath at Gunthorpe, where he was stuck with a barge full of coal and a broken rudder, and she told him, before she'd even learned his name, that he would never see the bottom of the river unless he learned to step lightly.
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He laughed at that. Everyone laughed at Tom. But the summer they wed, the dance was held on the lock-side meadow, with lanterns strung between the willows and a fiddler from Newark standing on an upturned crate. Ada wrote out the words on a scrap of paper and pinned it to the post for the fiddler to read, because the man could not read a note of music. I hope you dance, it said, in her fine looping hand.
They say Tom danced all night, and that the water kept time under the barge. The paper blew into the river at dawn, and Ada never bothered to fetch it back. Some things, she told me, are better sent off than kept.
There, that's the lock open. Hold the tiller steady and mind your footing on the wet planks, for Tom always said the river rewards the light of foot.
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