Black ink tattoo of a striped castle silhouette inside an arc, with the numbers 13.1, 26.2 and 39.3 beneath it, on the ankle.

Striped castle and numbers on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a castle silhouette with horizontal stripes cut through its body, sitting inside a thin black arc. Three numbers, 13.1, 26.2 and 39.3, are set along the lower part of the design in a clean, thin typeface. The image shows only black ink on pale skin, with a striped fabric shoe at the bottom edge of the frame.

Ankle Castle Arc Stripe Number Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Corran was kneeling on the boards of Saltcombe Pier with a tin of black enamel when the first runner rounded the headland. The race was meant to finish at the pier gate, but nobody had told her it would be this early, or that the man would stop beside her bucket, hands on his knees, to ask what the castle on the gatepost was supposed to be.

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"The folly on Bellhaven Hill," she said, and dipped her brush. "Built by a man who lost a wager with his sister and had to make her a castle out of stone he didn't own. The weather got into it. Every storm left a stripe." She drew one across the tower while he watched, and he counted them under his breath the way runners do, as if the numbers might hold him up.

He told her he had done the thirteen miles that morning and the twenty-six the year before, and that his legs had a sense of humour about the rest. Nell said her own legs had stopped voting years ago. She had painted the gatepost every spring since her husband died, mostly because the council paid in fish suppers and because the stripes were quicker than remembering. Nobody had asked her why the castle was striped. The man did, and she found she had an answer ready.

When he had gone on, a little stiffly, towards the sea wall, she stepped back to look. The last figure, thirty-nine point three, sat in the lower corner in her thin careful hand, and the first flood tide was already sliding over the stones beneath the pier. She capped the tin and left the gate wet. By the time the paint dried, the castle would be as striped as it had ever been, and the water would have taken the rest.