Small black fine line skull tattoo on the ankle, shown beside a red high heeled shoe.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small skull tattoo on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small outlined skull with solid black eye sockets and nose is tattooed on the side of an ankle. The thin, even black linework has little shading, and the design sits against plain pale skin. A red patent high heeled shoe fills the lower part of the frame, with a beige carpet behind it.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You notice the skull before the shoes, because it is the only thing in the crate that has not been wrapped in tissue. Someone has drawn it in biro on the manifest, small and careful, two black dots for eyes and a nose like an upturned heart. Pryce, your supervisor, says it is a doodle left by a packer with time to kill. You say nothing. The declaration reads forty-one pairs of red patent court shoes, samples, no commercial value, and the driver, a quiet man from a town you cannot pronounce, swears he has never seen the crate before this morning.

Keep reading

You open the first box under the strip light. The red is so bright it looks wet. Every heel is clean and straight, and the stitching along the vamp is tighter than anything your country makes at this price. Turn one over and there it is again, pressed into the leather of the insole, no bigger than a fingernail, the same skull with its solid black sockets. Forty-one pairs, and somebody has signed each one the way a painter signs a corner of a canvas.

Pryce wants the crate cleared by four. The duty is nothing, the paperwork is in order, and the sample rule has been followed to the letter. You stand there longer than you should, thinking about the floors these shoes will cross, hotel carpets and polished stairs, and what it would take to leave a mark that small on every one of them.

At half past three you tick the box, stamp the sheet and tell the driver he is free to go. That evening you carry one pair home in your bag. You set it on the beige rug in your flat and tip the lamp toward the heel, and the little skull grins up at you from the sole, pleased with the bargain you have just made.

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