Black and grey tattoo of a ball of yarn, two knitting needles, buttons and a thread spool on an ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yarn ball, knitting needles and buttons on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo on the side of an ankle shows a ball of yarn with two knitting needles through it, plus two buttons and a spool of thread stacked behind and beside it. The linework is clean and the yarn is shaded with fine hatched strokes and soft grey tones to suggest the wound fibres. The image is a close, well-lit crop of the leg and foot against a dark background, with the design filling the centre of the frame.

Ankle Yarn Knitting needle Button Spool Thread

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow has been falling on Harrowgate Fell since Tuesday, and by Thursday the road below the inn has vanished under it. You sit by the back fire with a ball of grey wool in your lap, the one your mother posted up in the carrier's van last November, and you have been trying to finish the second sock since breakfast. The needles keep catching. Upstairs a guest is pacing, boots on the boards, the same four steps to the window and back.

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Mrs Pell comes through from the kitchen with a spool of black thread and a tin of buttons and sets them on the settle beside you without a word. The guest's coat, she says, has lost three buttons on the stairs, and he wants it ready for the morning whatever the weather. You thread the needle by firelight, squinting, and the buttons rattle in the tin like small dice. Outside the wind leans on the shutters as if it is trying to read the name painted above the door.

When you carry the coat up, the guest is standing very still at the window. He says he has been counting the lamps on the valley road, and that there were eleven last night and only nine now. You tell him the snow is deep on the lower lamps and always has been. He does not turn around. You fasten the last button, fold the coat over his arm, and hear the spool roll off the table behind you, unwinding a thin dark line down the stairs.

By morning the road is open and the coat is gone from the hook. On the settle the sock lies finished, its heel turned neatly, and beside it sits the empty tin. The black thread runs from nowhere you can see, through the cellar door and down into the snow-dark, where somebody below has begun, very carefully, to knit something back.