XOXO lettering on two ankles
Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo
Two bare feet rest on a grey blanket, one with a rolled denim trouser cuff. Each ankle carries the word XOXO in thin, black, handwritten-style lettering. The ink is solid black with no colour and the composition is a close, slightly angled view of both feet.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The ferryman at Hollin Ford had two sons who disagreed about everything except the weather, and even that they quarrelled over by supper. When the spring flood came down the valley and took the timber bridge, the elder, Tobin, was on the far bank with the goats, and the younger, Aled, was on the near bank with the boat and no oars to speak of.
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Neither could cross. For three days they shouted over the brown water, Tobin giving advice about the rope and Aled giving advice about Tobin's temper. On the fourth morning the water dropped a hand's width, and Aled tied a line to a stone and threw it. He missed. Tobin caught the stone instead, laughed until he sat down in the mud, and then the rope was across at last.
Aled hauled his brother over hand by hand. When Tobin landed, neither of them said sorry, so they did what their mother had always done when words ran short. Tobin pressed his brow to his brother's, and Aled, who thought himself too old for it, let him. Then they dipped a stick in the soot pot and marked the flat stone at the ford with four letters, X, O, X, O, the way their mother taught them: X for the arms that hold, O for the mouth that answers.
The stone is still there, the villagers say, though the bridge has been rebuilt three times. Each spring someone scrapes the moss from the letters and adds them afresh, and nobody in Hollin has ever asked who started it.
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