Black script reading Mischief Managed with a curved trail of footprints, tattooed on the top of a foot near the ankle.

Mischief Managed script and footprints on a foot

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads Mischief Managed in flowing black script that runs diagonally across the top of the foot. A curved trail of solid black footprints loops around the left end of the lettering. The linework is smooth and even, with the letters in one colour and minimal shading, and the photo is taken close up so the design fills most of the frame.

Lettering Ankle Script Footprint Phrase

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wet footprints reached the tea urn before anyone thought to ask whose they were. They came in through the side door of the Gull Hollow reading room, a neat curving trail of small soles, and they crossed the parquet as though they had somewhere important to be. Mrs Pardoe, who had kept the keys for thirty-one years, followed them with a mop in one hand and a sense of her own dignity in the other.

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They ended at the glass case where the lost property sat. Inside was a brass compass with a cracked face, a cricket ball nobody had claimed since the summer of the flood, and a folded sheet of paper that had come in with a bundle of returned library books. Tobias Quill, aged eleven, sat on the case's step with his socks drying on the radiator. He had one finger pressed to the paper. "It only works if you say it properly," he said. "Mischief managed. You have to mean it."

She did not believe him, naturally. She had been a librarian's assistant far too long to believe anything a boy said while holding a map that had been missing since 1953. But she unfolded the paper and saw ink lines crawling across it, tiny dots shuffling slowly towards the harbour wall, and the dots had soles. She read the words aloud, feeling foolish, and the dots lifted off the page and walked straight out of the door, across the road, and down onto the wet sand. There they stopped beside the rusted hook where her husband had once tied his rowing boat.

Tobias grinned. Mrs Pardoe took out her ledger, turned to the page marked Unclaimed, and wrote in careful capitals: RETURNED TO OWNER. Then she put the kettle on and watched the tide come in over the place where the prints had been, rubbing out every one.