Close-up of a black and grey penguin tattoo with a red heart and handwritten lettering above it on the lower leg near the ankle.

Penguin and handwritten heart on ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A black penguin with a swirling tribal-style body sits low on the lower leg, with a grey shape beside it. Above, a red heart and handwritten black lettering reading "I love U to Pluto and back" run across the skin. The mix of solid black, grey shading and a single red heart sits against pale skin, with the photo taken straight on and the ankle visible at the bottom edge.

Lettering Ankle Penguin Heart Handwritten text Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the village of Haddon Pit the men said the penguin had come up the shaft in the spring of the great flood, though nobody had seen him climb out. He waddled the colliery road in a black coat with a curl at his back like a fern unrolling, and he carried a miner's lamp that nobody had given him.

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He loved Nell, who sold pies from a barrow beside the winding gear. He could not sing, so he wrote to her in chalk on the pithead wall. I love U, he wrote, and the men laughed because his letters climbed uphill. She asked him how far that was. He did not know. The old deputy, who had read a book once, said Pluto was the furthest thing he had heard of, past the sea and past the stars, and that a man could only go so far before the rope ran out.

So the penguin went down. Each morning he rode the cage to the sixth level, then the seventh, lamp swinging, counting the hours by the drip of water on his beak. He went past the place where the seam thinned to nothing and kept going through the cold of the old workings, until his lamp found a grey stone shaped like a key, the first thing down there that was not coal. He touched it. Then he climbed back up the long way.

When he surfaced the pies had gone cold and Nell was waiting by the barrow with her shawl pulled tight. He told her he had been to Pluto and back. She asked whether it was far. He said it was exactly as far as the pit, and she laughed and gave him the last pie for nothing.