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Placement · placement_ankle

Ankle

The ankle joint. Tier 1 attested for the pig-and-rooster pair, and the museum record is UNCERTAIN between two placements at that level of detail: “With one on each ankle or on the feet, this design originated in the Second World War as protection against shipwreks or drowning.” The spelling is the source own and is transcribed faithfully.
Thin
Medium confidenceresearched

No links2 sources · T1

What the research says

placement_anatomy
Category
extremity
Available area
“The smallest areas on the body are best for simple designs made of basic shapes.”
Joint behavior
A joint. Not described by any fetched source.
Scale behavior
Small in the cited chart; “an ankle tattoo is like an anklet”
Conflicts or cautions
TWO TIER 1 SOURCES DISAGREE ABOUT WHERE THE SAME CONVENTION SITS. RMG says foot; the Historic Dockyard says ankle OR feet. Both are recorded, neither is corrected, and the motif rows keep the value foot because that is what their own cited source says.

Provenance

2 resolved
  • The Historic Dockyard Chatham

    Maritime heritage museum article on naval tattoo designs. Verbatim: records show designs that are "marks of love, loss and life events" while others demonstrate "national identities, religious faith, and patriotic pride"; "Each swallow represents 5,000 nautical miles in a sailor's career." One of the few tier 1 sources that speaks about tattoo subject matter as lived human experience rather than as art history.

    museum · retrieved 2026-08-28

  • Tattooing 101

    Professional tattoo-education page and the primary placement source for this batch. It is the only fetched source that bands EVERY body area by the size of work it holds - small, medium, large and extra-large - which is what makes the available_area and scale_behavior columns answerable at all. It also supplies the fit rule (“a forearm tattoo shouldn’t wrap so far around the arm that it overlaps”), the design-expansion warning, and two orientation rules. IMPORTANT NEGATIVE FINDING, recorded because it bears directly on what this corpus may claim: the page states “Tattoo placements don’t have any specific meaning tied to them.” That is a Tier 2 trade claim about the modern Western commercial context in which the page is written. IT DOES NOT AND CANNOT SETTLE whether placement carries meaning or restriction in any cultural tradition - two Tier 1 museum sources in this same batch record placements that do. The claim is recorded, scoped, and NOT used to suppress a cultural placement rule anywhere in the corpus.

    professional tattoo source · retrieved 2026-08-30

0 links

No relationship in the corpus touches Ankle. The graph is sparse; the type listings carry browsing.