Black and grey tattoo of a ribbon banner with the words I solemnly swear that I am up to no good, surrounded by footprints, on skin.

Ribbon banner with footprints

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A ribbon banner stretches across the skin with the words I SOLEMNLY SWEAR THAT I AM UP TO NO GOOD in capital letters, and its ends curl outwards at both sides. Footprints trail across and around the banner in the upper area. The work uses bold outlines with soft grey shading to give the ribbon folds depth, and there is no colour ink. The banner fills the centre of the frame against plain pale skin.

Lettering Other Ribbon Banner Footprint Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pruett's allotment gate had a new padlock by Tuesday, so Dilys went over the wall instead, the way the two of them always had. Frost lay thick on the cabbages. Behind her, Ivo was already hissing that the bin lid would give them away, and she told him to stop being a sack of potatoes and lift his feet.

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They had a plan written on the back of a seed packet. The plan was mostly drawings. Every step they took after dark, they meant to leave behind them in the white, boot prints trailing over the lawns and back again, so that anybody who came out at dawn would read the night like a confession. Ivo had insisted on the wording. He had found it in a library book about pirates and said it sounded official, and Dilys agreed, because it did, and because the words were far too grand for a pair of twelve-year-olds who had let the Hendersons' goat out of its pen.

The goat was never found. By morning the prints ran from the allotments, across the railway footbridge and around the war memorial three times, then straight up to the vicar's front step, where Ivo had stood on one leg and tried to spell the rest of the sentence in soot.

Mrs Pruett read the trail from her kitchen window with her tea going cold. She counted the prints, then the goat's hoofmarks beside them, then the little dent where somebody had stopped to laugh. Dilys saw her from the bottom of the garden and waved, and Mrs Pruett, to her lasting annoyance, waved back.