Small colour tattoo of a tooth with a purple violet flower beside it on the top of a foot.

Tooth and violet on a foot

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of a tooth with a dark outline, pale shaded enamel and a grey wash along one root. Beside it sits a purple five-petalled violet flower with yellow centres, shaded in soft lilac. The tattoo sits on the top of a bare foot against a blue plastic sheet, photographed from above at a close angle.

Fine line Other Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the frost still lay white in the furrows when Ruth knelt by the back gate and pressed the little tooth into the soft earth under the hedge. Her son Sam stood on the step in his wellies, stamping against the cold, his breath going up in small clouds. 'Why there?' he asked. 'Because that's where the violets come up,' she said, and tucked the wet soil over it with her thumb.

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Her own mother had done the same on Hollins Farm, and her mother before that. Every tooth lost in the house went under the hedge, because the old saying went that a farm which takes from its people owes them something green in return. Winter had been hard. The hay was short, the ewes were thin, and the beck had frozen so deep the boys had walked across it to fetch the post. Sam did not believe in saying things twice, so he only nodded and went in to the fire, muttering that he would not lose another tooth for a long while.

In March he went back alone. Snow still lay in the ditch, grey and crusted, but beneath the hedge the violets had come up in a ragged ring, purple and sharp against the dead leaves. Near the middle one stem bent low, and at its root sat a pale curved knob, smooth as enamel, that had not been there before. He crouched a long time looking at it.

He did not dig it up. He pressed the snow back over the stem with his glove, the way his mother had shown him, and went up the lane to tell her the field had paid up early this year.