Black tribal-style tattoo running up a bare ankle and across the top of a foot, with turquoise bead anklet and toe ring jewellery.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal tattoo on an ankle and foot

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot and lower leg are shown, with a black tribal-style tattoo covering the ankle and extending across the top of the foot. The linework is bold and mostly solid black with some grey shading, and the ink is set against warm skin on a plain grey floor. A copper chain anklet with square turquoise beads and a toe ring with a connecting chain add colour and sit over the design.

Ankle Foot Ankle Tribal Anklet Bead Chain Nail polish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the lamps on the quay are going out one at a time and I'll not raise my voice for the gulls. Every soul in Saltmere knew Ines Cardew, who sold blue stones from a tin box under the fish-hall roof, and who was never seen without her copper chain. The chain had been her mother's, and her mother's before that, and it ran from ankle to toe the way a line runs from a boat to the weight that keeps it steady.

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The stones were the reason for the bargain. Her grandfather had dived for them in the cold pool below the lighthouse, where the bell of St Ada lay under forty fathoms of weed. The bell had gone down in a storm the year the town stopped singing, and the sea had kept its tongue. Every stone he brought up came with a promise: the tide would carry one thing home for each one taken. Ines never trusted the promise, but she counted the stones every night, and the count was always right.

One October the count came out short. One square bead was gone from the box, and on the black lines of the vine that climbed the bone of her foot, a new curl had appeared, sharp as a fishhook. The fishmonger's boy swore he had seen nothing. The gulls had gone quiet. Ines walked down to the water at the turn of the tide, the chain jingling at every step, and she waited.

At slack water the bell rang once, muffled, from far below the weed. Something knocked against the quay wall, and out of the black water rolled a small stone, polished smooth, with a copper link through its hole. That is how the sea settles its debts, my friends, with a little something handed back and never the thing you wanted most. Now mind the steps on your way up, and take your lamp.