Black fine line outline tattoo of a standing penguin on an ankle, set against a red background.

Penguin outline on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a standing penguin drawn as a single unshaded outline, with its head turned to the right and a small flipper curving down the side of its body. The linework is even and thin, and the design is filled only by the bare skin, with no shading or colour. It sits centrally on the ankle, with the red fabric behind it making the black ink stand out clearly.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Peg Lusk kept a penguin in the margin of every letter she sent to her brother on the Falklands boat. She drew it without lifting the pen, one unbroken line from beak to flipper, because she had read somewhere that a creature drawn that way could not be taken away from you. Her brother wrote back that penguins did not care for paper and would sooner stand in the wind than be kept in a drawer.

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The bird in her letters would not stay still. Each time she finished it, it had turned its head a little further to the right, toward the water that was not on the page. She tried a fine nib and then a broader one. She tried the drawing in the afternoons and again by lamplight, and the head kept turning. Her neighbour said the thing wanted to go home, and Peg said that was nonsense, as it had never been anywhere.

When the letters stopped that winter, she kept drawing the bird anyway, on the backs of bills and the blank corners of the parish notices. Each one looked a little more like a bird that had decided something. In March a crate came up from the docks with her brother's name stencilled on the side, and inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a single stone with a penguin scratched into it, the line unbroken, the head turned to the right.

Peg carried it down to the harbour wall at dusk. She set it on the stones, lifted her pen for the first time in nine years, and drew a short line of her own across the wet slate. The penguin on the stone took one step toward the tide, and she let it go.

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