Black ink tattoo of a rosary-style beaded anklet wrapping the ankle, with a cross on the top of the foot, shown on a padded table.

Rosary anklet and cross tattoo on a foot

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot and ankle rest on a plastic-covered padded table, showing a black tattoo of a beaded rosary chain that wraps around the ankle and runs down onto the top of the foot. A cross with ornate, flared ends sits at the end of the chain, shaded in solid black and grey with clean outlines. The background is pale and blurred, keeping the focus on the tattoo.

Ankle Rosary Cross Bead Chain Anklet Foot

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop pretending you don't remember the Christmas dinner at St Columba's. Nobody in this hall can say they missed Sister Agnes snatching the rosary off Dolores Finch in the middle of the carols. I was the one who crawled under the trestle for it, and I've been meaning to tell you where it went.

Keep reading

It went to the Wednesday market, to a stall run by Tommy Quayle, who sold jet and cheap silver off a tin tray. He wasn't a thief, not really. He gave Dolores a quarter of humbugs and a promise that the cross would be kept safe until she came back for it. She never came back. Forty years on she sits by the urn pretending the whole business belonged to somebody else, and the cross has been rattling about in my handbag all this time.

Tommy's daughter found the tin after he died and posted it to me, because my name was written on the lid in his terrible capitals. Inside lay forty-one jet beads on a loop of wire, and a folded note in pencil: the cross is for whoever counts them through without losing their place. Made to be worn low, where a girl could hide it under her stockings. I counted them on the number 9 bus and lost my place twice. Then I thought, well, that's the trouble with all of us.

So here, Dolores, is your cross. Mind the flared ends, they've snagged every coat in Lancashire. Pass it along the row and let the chain do what chains do, go round and round until somebody's patience wears through.