Two small black Chinese characters tattooed on the inner ankles of a pair of bare feet resting on a wooden deck, in lettering style.

Two Chinese characters, one on each ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet rest on a weathered wooden deck, with a small black Chinese character tattooed on each ankle. The characters are crisp, solid black lines with even weight, and the skin tone is natural with no colour ink. The framing is close and side-on, with the feet filling the lower half of the picture and a blue-grey wall and a pink sandal in the background.

Lettering Ankle Chinese character Feet

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry to Skerra Holm only ran on Tuesdays and Fridays in February, so Nell took the Friday boat or waited a week, and she had never once waited for anything. I stood on the slipway with the wind pulling her hair across her mouth while she hitched her rucksack higher and tucked a tin of Mam's oatcakes under one arm. The gulls were fighting over a split crab on the rail behind us.

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We had got the marks done the summer before, in a back room above the chandler's, the needle buzzing like a trapped wasp. The man who inked us had drawn the characters on tracing paper with a flat pencil. He said the one he gave me meant elder sister and the one for Nell meant younger, and Nell laughed and said that was the most accurate thing anyone had ever told her. She had been going first all her life. Now she was going first again, and I was supposed to be glad, and mostly I was.

The horn sounded twice. She turned at the top of the ramp, lifted one foot onto the rail the way she used to on the harbour wall when she was six, and showed me the little black mark on her ankle, the one that matched mine. Then she was gone behind the wheelhouse.

I walked the strand back to the cottage. The tide had come in over our footprints from the morning, and the sand was smooth except for one line of prints running from the water to the dunes, sharp at the heel, as if someone had pressed hard and not looked back.