Small dark blue-black script tattoo on the ankle of a person wearing taupe lace-up block heel sandals, shown in a lettering style.

Small script tattoo on an ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a legs-crossed pose with a small cursive script tattoo on the ankle, rendered in dark blue-grey ink. The words are too small and fine to read clearly at this resolution. The taupe lace-up block heel sandals and pale grey backdrop sit in the lower frame, with the tattoo as the focal point.

Lettering Ankle Script Sandal Heel Leg

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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

You will not believe what came up from the harbour this morning, though I suppose you have stopped believing anything I write since you sailed for Alexandria. The wool merchant's boy brought a pair of sandals wrapped in fuller's cloth, and Uncle Sosia would not let me untie the thongs until he had looked at them himself.

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They are the finest work this workshop has ever done. The heels are cut from a block of cedar that came off a Phoenician ship and was stacked by the river to season for two winters, and the uppers are the colour of silt after the Tiber floods, a taupe Sosia says no one can name twice. Eight waxed eyelets run up each side, and the laces wind through them like ivy on a wall, so the foot is caged but the toes are left open to the air.

Then Sosia turned one over, and I saw what he had been hiding. Inside the insole, where no one will ever look unless they are lying down, he had scratched a line of script with a bone awl. The letters run backwards, as a seal does, so they only read true when pressed into wet leather. He had dipped the awl in the soot-and-gall ink he uses for stitching, a blue-grey that goes almost black at the edges.

I held the sandal up to the window and read it in the glass, slowly, the way you taught me to read Greek. It was not a name. It said only: walk where the road is dry, and come home before the figs. Write soon, Callista, and tell me whether the words read true from where you are standing.