Two small black fine line tattoos of a curled stroke symbol on the ankles of two people, shown close up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small matching ankle tattoos

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two bare ankles, one on each person, each with a small single black tattoo of a simple curled stroke with a short tail. The linework is thin and solid with no shading, and the ink is dark against the skin. The image is a close, slightly angled crop of the feet on a dark floor, with a hand and a sandal visible at the right edge.

Fine line Ankle Symbol Curl Small tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice had the lock gates shut by Tuesday, so Mags and I were stuck in the lock-keeper's cottage with the stove and Father's ledger. He never wrote a word in it that wasn't a boat. Each one got a stroke down the page, and when a boat came through clean he finished the line with a small curl at the foot, like a tail, to say no cargo had been lost. Mags said it looked like a tadpole. I said it looked like a comma that had changed its mind.

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The canal froze solid on the fourth night. Mrs Pardoe from the chandlery had left a bottle of sloe gin on the step, and Mags said that if we were going to be stuck in February we might as well be stuck with something to show for it. We walked out with a lantern to the old winding hole, where the water had gone grey and still, and she drew a curl in the frost with the end of a bootlace before taking a pen from her coat. We agreed to have it done properly in town when the thaw came, and I still think she meant to have it done that same week, the way she meant most things.

The thaw came late, and the chandlery had closed for the season. The last page of the ledger had a curl at the bottom with no boat beside it, in Father's hand, dated the week before he took ill. Mags found it first and said nothing, just turned the book toward me and tapped the empty line.

We brought the first boat through ourselves in March, a coal barge with its paint half gone. I wrote its name in the ledger and finished the line with a curl, and Mags, standing on the gate beam with the water rising under us, laughed and said that was the most useful comma she had ever seen.