Small black scroll tattoo on the outer ankle, shown beside a white leopard-print canvas trainer and rolled denim jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small scroll tattoo on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of an ornamental motif with interlocking curls and scrolls sits on the side of an ankle. The bold, solid black lines are clean and even, with no shading. The skin is lit warmly against a grey concrete ground, and the shot is taken at a low angle with a leopard-print canvas trainer and rolled denim in the frame.

Ankle Scroll Swirl Ornament Curl

Find an artist for this

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 lettering on the second wagon had been flaking since Whitsun, and Ivor Sheen had promised the ringmaster he would have it right before the Dorrin & Vale tent went up in Chorley. He mixed the gold size on an upturned biscuit tin, thinned it with turpentine until it ran like weak tea, and sat on the step with his mahl stick across his knees. Nobody else left with the show still knew how to pull a flourish.

Keep reading

The scrolls were the hard part. A straight stroke any boy could manage after a summer's practice, but the curl that turned back on itself, the second loop tucked under the first like a ram's horn, needed a hand that did not wobble. Ivor had learned it from his father, who had learned it painting pub signs in Bolton before the war, and who used to say a scroll was just a line that had decided not to go anywhere in particular.

By the third week the show had lost its trapeze artist to a shipyard in Barrow and its clown to a bad chest. Ivor worked nights under a paraffin lamp, the canvas breathing around him, the elephants shifting in their straw. Mrs Vale came down the steps on the last evening with a flask of tea and stood looking at the panel for a long time.

'You've made the curls go the wrong way,' she said. He had not. He looked again, and she was right: every loop turned towards the road, as if the whole show were leaning to leave. He sighed, wiped the brush on his trousers, and began again from the top, bringing the last flourish round towards the wheels, where the show would have to come back from.