Small traditional-style tattoo of a red flower and green leaves with a banner on the ankle, above teal marbled leather boots.

Small red flower tattoo above teal boots

Traditional · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

The main subject is a pair of teal and navy marbled leather boots with black laces and yellow stitching, worn on legs standing on a dark road surface. A small tattoo on the lower leg above the left boot shows a red flower with green leaves and a banner with partly visible lettering. The tattoo is small in the frame, so its linework and shading are hard to judge, but it appears to be mainly colour with black outlines.

Traditional Ankle Flower Banner Leaves Boot Lace Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The marbling never goes right the first time. Your uncle told you that over the vat of ox-gall and ink, while the leather sank and bloomed under your hands like a bruise running backwards. You had made nine pairs of teal boots that spring and sold none of them, because teal is a colour people admire from across a shop and then refuse to wear on their own feet.

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Then Marta came in out of the rain with a split lace and a red paper flower tucked behind one ear, and asked whether you could make something that would walk through a town without asking anyone's leave. You said yes before you had thought about it. She laughed and said everyone says yes first, and that was why she trusted you less than the man on Fargate who had said no.

The boots took eleven weeks. You cut the uppers from a single hide so the navy veins would run down the ankle without a seam, and you stitched the welt in yellow thread because she wanted them to look like they were carrying a warning. On the day she collected them, she turned the tongue back and showed you the inside, where you had sewn a scrap of cloth with a red poppy and three black words that only showed when she bent her foot: REMEMBER ME.

She left on the 6.14 to Leeds and didn't write. Months later a parcel arrived with the boots in it, one lace cut short, and a note that said: I've walked further in these than I meant to. Your uncle read it over your shoulder and said nothing. You went back to the vat, because marbling is the only trade where the water decides the pattern, and you have to let it.