Black fine-line tattoo of a row of angular runic-style symbols on the inner ankle, with a dark sock and a pink blanket in the background.

Small runic inscription on the ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small row of angular, runic-style symbols is tattooed in black ink on the inner ankle. The linework is thin and even, with no visible shading, and the design sits centrally across the skin. The rest of the frame shows a dark sock and a soft pink blanket, which keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Ankle Rune Symbol Script

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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 generator coughs twice before the Big Wheel catches, and you are already counting the ash tiles in the tin, because Mrs Vane never trusted a number she hadn't counted herself. Forty-one of them, each the size of a biscuit, each cut with the same angular row of strokes you learned from a book that smelled of paraffin. The fair calls it fortune. You call it inventory.

Keep reading

Most nights the children come to the booth for a reading and leave with the marks copied onto their hands in biro. A boy in a yellow anorak wants to know what his says. You tell him it says keep moving, which is not a translation, and he seems satisfied by it. He is the only customer all week who does not ask about money.

On the last night of the season, when the rides are already sheeted and the lights are off, the boy comes back alone. He has a tile in his fist, one you never sold, and he says his gran's cellar flooded, so he dug it out of the mud by the river. You turn it over. The strokes are yours, but the last one is wrong, cut backwards, the way you did it at fourteen before anyone corrected you.

You drive out at dawn with the tin rattling in the footwell and the tile on the dashboard. At a lay-by near Peterborough the sun comes up behind it and the row of marks throws a thin shadow across the seat, and for a second the message reads like something you wrote to yourself long ago and have only now come round to.