Black script lettering reading Run and not grow weary across the top of a foot, with painted toenails visible at the front.

Script quote across the top of a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of the top of a bare foot with the words Run and not grow weary written in flowing black script. The fine, connected linework has a handwritten feel and the lettering follows the curve of the foot from the ankle towards the toes. The image is shot close up against a wooden surface and a white background, with warm skin tones and no colour ink.

Lettering Other Script Quote Foot Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mail left Coldwater well every morning before the sun cleared the ridge, and it left on foot, because the road to Saddle Tank was too soft for mules after the spring rains and too sandy for carts in any season. Old Ruth Abernathy kept the well-house ledger, and she would not let a runner start until she had written the day's line across the ankle of his left foot in iron-gall ink. She said the ink outlasted a man's patience, which was a joke she made to everyone and which nobody laughed at.

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Hal Wenning was nineteen and sure of himself, and on his first run he asked her what the words meant. She read them aloud as if they were the price of salt: Run, and not grow weary. He said the road did not care whether he grew weary, and she agreed that it did not. The words were not for the road, she told him. They were for the runner, who was the only thing out there that could be asked to care.

On the third day the heat came up off the flats like a wall being built, and Hal sat down in the shade of a dry wash to rest his legs. He pulled his boot off and looked at the ink. The letters curled around his ankle the way a dog runs ahead on a track, always a little in front, waiting for him to catch up. He got up and walked, then ran, and by dusk he had delivered the sealed packet to a widow at Saddle Tank who had been waiting nine days for it.

When he came home, Ruth took his foot in her lap without a word and studied the faded line. Then she showed him her own ankle, where the same words had been written so many times the ink had gone brown and soft as a bruise. Her mother had written them there, she said, and her mother's mother before that, back to a time when the road had been called something else. Hal watched her bend to the ledger and begin the day's line in the same careful hand.