Black lettering reading STRONG on one ankle and a small row of three solid dots on the other ankle, both in black ink.

Strong lettering and three dots on ankles

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet are photographed close together against white bedding. One ankle carries the word STRONG in black capital letters with a serif typeface, and the other carries three small, evenly spaced solid dots. The lettering has clean, even edges and the dots are crisp, with no visible shading, and the ink reads as black against warm skin tones.

Lettering Dotwork Ankle Word Dot Feet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ladder leans against the Bramley in the last week of August, and you have been up it since before the wasps woke. Your sister Jo holds the bottom rung with her boot and calls up that the Discovery apples are dropping faster than the bins can take them. You tell her to hold on. Below you the grass is gold and split with windfalls, and the sun already sits on the back of your neck like a thumb.

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Your father planted these trees the year before Jo was born, and he liked to say an orchard is a long argument you lose gracefully. He has been gone three winters. His pruning hooks still hang in the shed on their nail, and the list he pinned to the door is still there too, a column of variety names in square capitals, each with a date and a small mark beside it. You have not taken it down. Jo says that is how you know you are not ready. You say it is how you know you are.

Halfway up you find a row of russets gone bronze, and beneath them a pale wound where a branch broke in June. Someone has tied a strip of red ribbon around it, though you never learned who. You hold a fruit in each hand and remember his habit of trailing off mid-sentence, the pause he'd leave hanging over the supper table until you filled it. We'll see, he used to say, and look at you as if the rest were yours to finish.

Jo shouts that the bins are full. You climb down with russets stuffed in your shirt, go into the shed, and take the marker from the jar. Back at the door you find the last line of his list, the one he never completed, a row of three dots where a harvest should have been. Under them you write the word he always meant to say about a good year: STRONG. Jo reads it over your shoulder and says nothing, which is the kindest thing she has done all summer.