Small fine line black letter Q with a solid red heart beside it, tattooed on the ankle.

Small black Q and red heart on ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo on the side of a foot near the ankle shows a black hand-drawn letter Q in a thin, single line, with a solid red heart placed just below it. The black linework is fine and even, and the red heart is a flat fill with no shading. The tattoo sits against plain skin on a neutral background, with the photograph framed tightly on the foot.

Fine line Lettering Ankle Heart

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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

The Marguerite had been out of Avonmouth nineteen days when the cook started handing me the letters. I was the only hand aboard with a steady enough pen for a swell, so most evenings I sat on an upturned bucket in the galley, copying out what the men could not spell while the kettle ticked on its hook.

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Jem Ferris wanted a Q at the bottom of his. Only a Q, the way his sister signed every card she'd ever sent him, a single loop with a tail that hooked back under like a fishing line. "Put a heart beneath it," he said, "so she knows it's me and not the bloody purser." I drew the Q first in one unbroken stroke, then the heart in the red ink we kept for marking the charts, pressing hard so it wouldn't feather into the paper.

We put into Freetown three weeks later and the agent took the bag ashore with the rest. Jem took the fever off the coast and never saw another port, and nobody on board had the heart to finish his letters after that. Eleven weeks on, a reply came out to us by pilot boat, addressed to the Marguerite in a looping hand that stopped short of the page's edge.

Inside was one line, Tell him I got it, and beneath the words a small black Q with its tail hooked back, and a heart in pencil gone over twice until it nearly tore through. I folded it into the chart drawer beside the red ink, where it still is. Some nights I take it out and count the strokes, one for every mile we were apart, which I have never once got to come out even.