Black ornamental blackwork tattoo across the top of an ankle and foot, worn with strappy heeled sandals and chain anklets.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate black ankle tattoo with strappy heels

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a woman's bare foot and ankle, showing a dark ornamental tattoo across the instep and up towards the ankle. The design appears to use bold black linework and filled areas with fine detail, and it is shown in black and grey only. The composition is cropped below a white and black patterned skirt, with the tattoo set against tan strappy heeled sandals and layered chains.

Blackwork Ankle Foot Ankle Chain Lace pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pricking card was already soft at the corners when Mrs Pethick slapped it down on the bench between the bobbins, and Ada knew from the way she didn't sit that the new design would be a difficult one. "Net first," she said. "Then the sprigs. Don't give me a gap you could lose a pin through." Ada bent over the card with the awl and the lamp, pricking a hundred tiny holes into the rough shape of a fern drawn by someone who had clearly never seen a fern, and by the time the church clock struck eleven her wrists ached like wet string.

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The bobbins ran in the dark, forty-eight of them, until the threads looked like rain falling upwards. Ada worked the ground in fours and twists, the old stitch her grandmother had taught her, and each evening Mrs Pethick came down in her wrapper and held the lace to the window to see whether the light came through evenly. It mostly did. On the third night Ada found a missed pin on the card, one small hole filled with the wrong crossing, and she stared at it until the candle guttered. "Leave it," Mrs Pethick said from the stairs. "Nobody buys a perfect thing. They buy the one where someone was tired."

The piece went up to London in a tin on the carrier's cart. Months later a cutting came back in the post, a shop window with a card beside a length of lace that read simply Devon, handmade. Ada found the wrong crossing at once, a knot of thread turned the other way, sitting in the middle of a fern as neat as a full stop. She pinned the cutting above the bench, and when the next pattern came down from the big house she pricked the card without fussing over a single hole.