Fine line script tattoo reading act justly love mercy walk humbly, with two small red hearts, across the top of a foot resting on a wooden deck.

Script quote with hearts on a foot

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a foot with a line of thin black script reading act justly love mercy walk humbly, running diagonally across the top of the foot. Two small red hearts sit between the words, and the rest of the lettering is in black ink. The foot is shown in soft natural light against a wooden deck, with a second foot and a denim trouser leg partly visible behind it.

Fine line Lettering Other Script Heart Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the only one left who can still letter a banner by hand, so Mrs Okonedo sends you up the ladder at six, before the dew has dried off the canvas. The big top has three holes in its roof now, and the seats were sold to a school in Swindon. Behind the wagons the ringmaster's old caravan sits on bricks, its wheels long gone to the scrap man.

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The words are the ones Teodor painted over the entrance when the show still toured: act justly, love mercy, walk humbly. He used to say they came from a prophet and not from a circus man, but that a ringmaster needed nothing more. You dip the fine brush in black and stop with it hovering. The two red hearts were the twins' idea, dabbed between the phrases the summer they rode the bareback horses. Nobody has asked you to paint them since the twins left.

You paint them anyway, small and red, one after each phrase. Mrs Okonedo comes out with tea in a chipped mug and reads the board from the foot of the ladder, her lips moving over the letters. "Teodor's hand," she says. "Mine's shakier now." "It's yours now," you tell her, and she laughs for the first time this season, a sound like a gate that needs oiling.

By noon the board is hung over the gate. The wind takes its loose corner and snaps it flat against the fence, and the words stand out clean against the grey sky. There are three people in the car park and a dog that has wandered in from the lane. The hearts are still wet when you climb down, so you leave the ladder against the wall and let them dry in the sun.