Black and grey script tattoo reading one step at a time with a small looped flourish, across the side of a foot.

One step at a time script on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is the phrase one step at a time in flowing cursive script, running diagonally across the side of a foot. The linework is smooth and fairly bold, with a looped flourish rising above the word step. The image is black and grey, shown in a monochrome photograph against a dark background.

Lettering Other Script Quote Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The path into Harrow Wood begins behind the bakehouse, where the cobbles give out and the ground goes soft with last autumn's leaves. My grandmother walked it every Sunday for sixty years to visit her brother's grave on the far side, and she never once went fast. I used to trot ahead and wait for her at the stile, and she would lift one finger at me, as if I had asked a question she had already answered.

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The summer I turned nine, the mill owner's son got lost in the trees on a dare. For three days the village searched, lanterns bobbing between the trunks, men calling his name until it came back to them off the bark. On the fourth morning Gran knocked on our door with her boots already laced. 'Nobody finds anybody by running,' she said. 'Mark the ground in front of you and go to the next mark.' She had a tin of white chalk, and she made me write the boy's name on the back of an old seed packet so we would have something to hold.

We went in slowly, a few yards at a time, scratching a small cross on a root or stone each time we stopped. I counted every step aloud because she said counting kept the panic in the chest rather than the legs. Near noon we heard a hoarse call from a hollow under a fallen oak. The boy was sitting on his coat with a twisted ankle, and he had kept himself steady by doing exactly what we did, moving once and then waiting.

Gran patted the seed packet in my pocket. 'Now you know the trick,' she said, and I did not understand until years later that she had meant it for the boy as much as for me. I still walk the path her way. At the stile I make a small white cross on the post and set off again, one mark and then the next, the seed packet soft as cloth in my pocket.