Black script lettering tattoos on both ankles, shown above black leather brogues and rolled dark jeans on mossy ground.

Script tattoos on both ankles

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a person standing on mossy ground, wearing black leather brogues and dark jeans rolled at the ankle. Both ankles carry matching black script lettering tattoos, with fine linework and some shading in the letterforms. The palette is muted, with greens from the foliage behind softening the dark ink and clothing.

Lettering Ankle Script Quote Ankle Jeans Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guard at Hallow Bridge held his lantern low and asked Ilse what she carried across. She said nothing she could put in a sack. He looked at her boots, then at the ankles above them, where two lines of black script ran round the bone like a pair of bands. He could not read the old letters, so he asked her to say them.

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Her grandmother Marit had inked them the winter Ilse turned nine, with soot from the ferry lamp and a needle sharpened on a whetstone by the river. Marit was a ferrywoman who never once got lost on the water, though the fog came down thick enough to hide a barge. The words were simple. Keep to the moss, and the moss will keep you. Ilse had thought it a child's rhyme until the year the fog took her uncle's boat, and he was found three days later, alive, sitting on a green stone on the wrong bank, his shoes full of water and his face calm.

The guard listened, moved his lantern over the stones, and saw the moss growing thick along the crossing path where the cart ruts had worn the earth bare. He had walked that path every night for twenty years and never once noticed it was the only green thing on the road. He stepped aside and let her pass.

On the far bank the ground was soft and wet. Ilse stood a while in the dark, then stepped carefully from one green patch to the next, and felt the damp coming through the leather of her brogues, the way Marit had said it would. Behind her the lantern swung and dimmed, and the river went on with its business.