Lettering tattoo reading I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good, with dark footprints beside it, glowing blue-white under blacklight on an arm.

UV quote tattoo with footprints

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on an arm under ultraviolet light. The script lettering reads I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good and glows blue-white, while a trail of dark footprints runs diagonally above it in black ink. The purple-tinted background and blacklight make the glowing text the focal point of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Text Quote Footprint Uv ink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Sallow Lock could say when the footprints began, only that Ada Fenn found them every morning on the wet gate beams, dark and short-stepped, running from the water to the lamp post and stopping there as if their owner had simply been lifted away. She kept the passage book in the lock cottage, and she wrote each boat down in her square hand, and beside the entries she began to write the prints too, because her father had taught her that a keeper who did not note a thing was not keeping anything.

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The bargemen had their theories. Mick Dorrin on the Hollyhock said it was a boy from the almshouse who wanted to be seen. Old Pell swore it was a heron that had learned to walk upright. Ada believed neither. She took to sitting up with a candle and a little jar of lamp oil, and on the third night she saw that the prints only showed when she held the flame low to the wood. In the ordinary lantern light they were nothing. Under the candle they glowed pale as chalk, and they went up the towpath, over the cabin roofs, and across the sleeping dog on the Mary Ellen without waking him.

She followed them to the weir, and then to her own front step, where they stopped at the threshold of the lock cottage. Ada stood there a long while with the candle guttering in her hand. Then she looked down at her own bare feet, damp from the cold stones, and understood that she had been walking the cut in her sleep since the spring flood.

In the morning the passage book recorded one vessel, unnamed, and under it, in her square hand, she wrote that no harm had been done, and then, because it was true and because her father would have laughed, she wrote that she was up to no good.