Geometric tattoo of a red rectangle, a teal rectangle and a black circle on the outer ankle, with a small line sketch of the design in the top left corner.

Red, teal and black geometric shapes on an ankle

Geometric · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of a red vertical rectangle, a teal rectangle and a solid black circle sits on the outer ankle of a pale foot. The shapes are flat solid fills with crisp edges and no shading, and the teal and red blocks overlap slightly behind the black circle. A small inset in the top left shows the hand-drawn line sketch of the same arrangement.

Geometric Ankle Rectangle Circle Abstract shape Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo came up the stairs at seven with the rain still on her coat and asked me to paint a sign that said nothing. I told her every sign says something. She laid a sketch on my bench, pencil lines on squared paper: a tall box, a shorter box set behind it, and a ring with a dot in its middle. She said the dot was the important part and the boxes were only there to hold it up.

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I mixed the red from madder and a little lead, because the board I had from the shop on Cutler Lane was already primed and I didn't want to waste a morning. The teal I made from verdigris and linseed, which takes a week to go hard and smells faintly of pennies. I laid the red first, flat, with no brush marks showing, because she was particular about edges. Then the teal, slid under the red so the two overlapped where the bell would have hung. The black I did last, one full disc with no highlight, mixed from lamp soot and varnish until it looked like a hole punched through the board.

When it was finished she stood in the doorway for a long time and did not pay. Her husband had cast ships' bells for forty years, she said, and had never once rung one himself. The foundry was closing on Friday. She wanted the sign hung over its door so that anyone walking past would see the shapes and know a bell had been made there and had gone out into the world without anyone standing beside it to hear it.

I hung it at dusk. By morning rain had collected in the hollow where the black disc sat on the red, a small dark pool sitting exactly on the circle, and the teal caught the grey light from the street. Mrs Okonedo came back before the shutters were up, ran her fingers over the edges the way a blind woman reads a face, and paid me in coins still warm from her pocket.