Black and grey script lettering with a flower and leaf vine tattooed across the top of a foot, beside a pink string anklet.

Script phrase with flower and vine on foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the top of a bare foot showing a black and grey tattoo of a cursive script phrase with a stylised flower and a trailing vine of leaves. The linework is fine and the script is softly shaded, with the flower drawn in more detail than the leaves. The pale skin and plain wooden background keep the focus on the tattoo, which runs diagonally from the toes towards the ankle.

Lettering Botanical Other Script Phrase Flower Vine Leaves 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 on the hay bale, lad, and leave the sawdust alone, because the wagon with the faded sign is still standing by the far gate and I want you to see it before the lamps go out. Sixty years back that sign said nothing but the name of the show in curling red paint. Then Lucia Ferraro, who could walk a wire at dawn and did it for pleasure, took a brush to the bottom board herself. Her husband was a clown with no sense of timing. He had asked her to marry him three times in one week, and on the third she had finally said yes, so she wrote the words in her grandmother's Italian, ti amerò per sempre, and nobody on the lot could read it except the old strongman, who blushed like a beetroot.

Keep reading

The show kept moving, as shows do. The clown went off with a trapeze girl from Hull before the first frost, and Lucia stayed on the road with the same wagon and the same wet paint. She added a lily at the end of the line, and a vine that climbed up over the spokes of the back wheel, leaf after leaf, as if it had been told to keep going. Every spring she gave the wood a coat of linseed and said the vine needed no reason to grow. When the brothers bought the outfit after her, they repainted the name on the side in gold, but when they reached the bottom board they stopped with the brush lifted, and nobody had the heart to cover the lily.

So it stayed, and you can still see it if the light is low. Last August a small girl sat on this very bale while her mother queued for candyfloss, and she ran a finger along the vine in the dust without knowing what it said. Her mother called her away before the lily was finished, and I have never been sure the child cared about the words. Some things are written for the one who reads them, and some are written for the one who only follows the line to the end. Now off you go, the lamps are lit.