Black ink tattoo of a running figure beside the numerals 42.2 on the ankle, with blue running shoes below.

Running figure and 42.2 ankle tattoo

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black outline of a stylised runner sits on the outer ankle, with the numerals 42.2 written beside it in the same black ink. The linework is thick and somewhat brushlike with no shading, and the design is shown in black and grey against a wooden floor, with the wearer in blue running shoes and white socks.

Ankle Numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sunday, 6.40 a.m. The tide is out at Pellow Bay and the marshals have already chalked the first kilometre on the sea wall. Dad would have hated the cold. I have his old stopwatch clipped to my coat, the one with the cracked face he never let anyone replace, and I keep checking it against the clock on the harbour tower, which is four minutes fast and has been since before I was born.

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The runners come past the lighthouse in a long grey ribbon, breath smoking, some of them laughing, most of them staring at a point eight metres ahead as if it might move. A woman in a yellow vest is limping but refusing the wheelchair the first-aid tent keeps offering. I write down her number and nothing else. Mum told me to bring a flask. I forgot it on the bus.

Dad used to say forty-two point two was the only distance that ever made sense to him: not forty, not fifty, a strange little fraction that means you have finally arrived somewhere nobody else has bothered to go. He ran it once, in 1989, and came home with blisters he showed us like medals.

The last runner through the gate is an old man in a tracksuit that predates the rest of us. He waves the stopwatch away, grinning, and says, Tell your father I finished. I say I will. I close the notebook and write the time down in biro, correct to the second, because the clock on the tower can be wrong but Dad's watch never was.