Black ink tattoo of two running shoe sole prints on the shoulder, one reading 13.1 miles and the other 26.2 miles.

Two running shoe prints with mileage text

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two shoe sole prints, one above the other, each with a tread pattern and a central circular motif. The text 13.1 miles sits on the lower print and 26.2 miles on the upper print, in a thin, hand-lettered script. The design is in solid black ink with no shading or colour, shown in a close photograph on pale skin.

Shoulder Footprint Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo kept the cobbler's shop on Harbour Row, and the trick, she told the young lad sweeping up, was in the heels. Every pair that came in for resoling had its tread read before she touched it: where the rubber had worn down to the canvas, which side the runner favoured, how many miles the soles had carried before they gave out. She wrote the numbers in pencil on the inside of the shoe box lids, and by Christmas she had a shelf of them that the lad called the ledger of feet.

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Then a pair came in with the soles still good and nothing else wrong with them. The owner, a woman who ran the bakery across the road, had worn them through two races that year and wanted them stamped. Not repaired, stamped. Mrs Okonedo asked for what. The baker said the number of miles, then was quiet a moment and said, one more, after the first, so the first would have a partner.

So Mrs Okonedo cut two discs from an old brass hinge plate, punched each with a ring of holes like a tread and a small hole in the middle for the eye of it, and set them in the soles. She pressed the figures in with a hand punch, thirteen point one on the left heel and twenty-six point two on the right, because the baker's husband had run the half, and the baker had run the whole, and that seemed to be the order it had happened in.

The lad asked why the second number was bigger if she had only run the first half once. Mrs Okonedo said he was thinking about it the wrong way round. The first half was the hard part, she said, and the rest was just the road.