Teal and grey koru-style scroll tattoo wrapping around the ankle and onto the top of the foot.

Teal koru scrolls wrapping an ankle

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A bold scrolled design of spirals and curved leaf-like forms wraps around the ankle and extends across the top of the foot. The forms use dark grey shading with bold outlines and teal and green fill, with fine hatched detail in the grey sections. The composition is wide and sweeping, following the curve of the ankle and foot against a pale grey textured backdrop.

Ankle Scroll Spiral Swirl Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boat had sat on the slipway since the spring tides, and the harbourmaster had told Tomasz Vane twice that she would not float until her stern was dressed. He climbed the ladder at dusk with a pot of copper-green paint and a brush cut down to three hairs, because the scrolls had to be right or the sea would not bother with them. Below him the grey tarpaulins snapped in the wind off the mud flats, and somebody's radio played dance music in the net loft.

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His grandmother had taught him the koru on the lid of a biscuit tin, a fern frond that does not hurry, that waits for the cold to lift before it opens. She had also told him the spiral is always the last thing you draw and the first thing a wave will test. So he began at the centre of the curl and let the outline run outward in one breath, the way she had shown him, then shaded the grey leaves beside it with fine hatching until the wood looked like it was holding its breath.

The paint dried darker than it went on. By the time he came down, the scrolls had turned the colour of deep water under cloud, and the teal fill beneath them looked as though light had got in underneath and stayed. Nobody came to watch the launch. The boat slid into the estuary on the ebb, and he stood on the wall with his hands in his pockets until the first swell came round the point and lifted her stern.

As it lifted, the sea rolled under the hull, the copper spiral caught the low sun, and the water curled back on itself across the estuary in exactly the shape he had drawn, as if the tide had been waiting all along to copy it.