Fine line black and grey tattoo of a small sprig with leaves on the ankle of a person wearing tan wooden-soled clogs and pale blue jeans.

Small sprig tattoo on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a person's legs in pale blue frayed-hem jeans, with one foot raised onto a red metal step and the other in a tan clog with a wooden sole. A small tattoo of a sprig with several leaves sits on the ankle, drawn in fine grey lines with light shading. The plain white wall and grey floor keep the focus on the tattoo and footwear.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Sprig Leaf Plant Jeans

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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 seed packet arrived on a Tuesday, pushed through the letterbox of the workshop on Chapel Lane, and Ada Sowerby read the postmark twice before she set down her gouge. Inside was a flat sprig of sea lavender her brother had pressed in 1961, the paper gone the colour of weak tea. A note in his square capitals said only: for the heel, if you still do heels.

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She still did heels. For forty years she had cut beech soles for the mill girls, then for the district nurses, then for anyone who walked the cobbles of the town and needed their feet to forgive them. Her brother had never owned a pair. He said wood made a racket on a stair. Ada had told him a clog was for hearing yourself arrive.

She spent the evening with a fine nib and grey ink, copying the sprig onto a scrap of card. The leaves were thin, the stem a single steady line, the shading a whisper of hatching where the pressed paper had curled at the base. Then she transferred it to the inside of the heel block with a hot pin, tapping lightly so the grain would take it and keep it.

On Saturday the clogs went to the station at the top of the hill. A girl in a denim jacket tried them on at the platform bench, stamped once on the concrete, and laughed. "It's a bit of a weed," she said, turning the pair over to look at the heels. "Lovely, though." Ada watched the train pull out and found she had nothing to say, which her brother would have thought very funny.