Black and grey fine line tattoo on the ankle, showing a chain anklet with a hanging star charm and a shaded rose.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and star anklet tattoo

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of an ankle and the top of a foot showing a tattoo styled as a chain anklet. A small star charm hangs from the thin linework chain, and a shaded grey rose sits on the outer side of the ankle. The lines are fine and the rose uses soft grey shading against the skin, with a plain dark background.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Anklet Chain Star Rose Bead

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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

Mrs Ada Foskett came into the shop on Pollard Lane the week the herring boats stopped running, and she put a silver chain on my counter with a star hanging off it like a lost sixpence. Forty pounds, she said, and I'd have it back by Michaelmas. I have been a pawnbroker's clerk for thirty-one years and I know a promise when it's sitting on the glass.

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The rose came from a different hand. It was the old Harbour Street fellow who had engraved the lid of every pocket watch in the town, and he had been paid in stew for twenty years. He once told me a rose on a chain was for a girl who was going somewhere and wanted the sea to know she had a sweetheart. I wrote that down in the margin of the ledger, which is not allowed.

Ada came back at Michaelmas with forty pounds in a handkerchief and no sweetheart. She said the chain had kept her company at the pier end every night through the winter, and she could not bear to sell the star to a stranger. I gave her back the star and kept the chain, which was the wrong way round, and she laughed until she had to sit on the stool.

The ledger still has her name, crossed through in red, and beside it the one word I wrote that night: returned. I keep the chain in the drawer under the scales. Sometimes, when the tide is out and the lamps on the pier come on, I take it out and look at the rose, which is still the grey of a February morning, and I think the sea must have known.