Black and grey photograph of a bare foot lying in grass, with thin script lettering and small footprint outlines tattooed on the ankle.

Script and footprints on an ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet rest on long dry grass in a greyscale photograph, with a fine cord anklet on one ankle and a small ring on a toe. A tattooed line of script runs along the ankle, with small footprint shapes above and beside the words. The thin dark linework is set against the pale skin, and the soft focus keeps the background grass in the frame.

Lettering Ankle Script Footprint Feet Anklet Grass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Penrose had been walking the dry moor since the rains stopped in June, and by August the grass was too brittle to hold a print. Nobody in Carrow Dale expected to see her brother again. The constable had given up on Tom at the first frost, and her mother had set his cup out only once more before she stopped.

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Ada did not stop. Each evening she went up past the sheepfold with a tin of biscuits and a hazel stick, and each evening she found the same thing: a line of small prints pressed flat in the stubble, going somewhere. They were not his boot prints, she said, because Tom wore iron nails in his soles and these were bare, round at the heel, the toes spread as if the walker had been glad of the ground. Beside them, where the grass had been bent and dragged, someone had written words with a hooked stick. The vicar read them aloud at the Harvest supper and called them nonsense. Ada said they were the start of a sentence, and she meant to find the end.

On the ninth evening the prints ran out at the lip of the old quarry, where the grass stood as high as a child. Ada knelt and read the last word the way it had been written, slowly, as if spelling it out for someone who could not see well. It was one word, and it was only "here".

She laughed then, a sound the village had not heard from her since spring, and sat down in the warm grass to wait for the dark to lift.