Black and grey tattoo of an anchor with orbiting atom rings and N and S compass points on the inner forearm.

Anchor and atom compass on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded anchor sits at the centre, with a circular emblem above its shank and several elliptical orbit lines, each ending in a dot, wrapped around it like an atom. Compass letters N and S mark the top and bottom, with small ornamental flourishes on either side. The linework is dark and the anchor is softly shaded in grey against pale skin, on a printed background with illegible handwriting and stamps.

Forearm Anchor Orbit Compass Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Wednesday post came in off the Harwich boat with the sacks still damp at the corners, and Mr Pell swore at every one of them as if the North Sea had posted them on purpose. I was sorting by the back window when the letter for Father turned up, stamped with a sailing ship and a foreign postmark I couldn't spell. Father had been waiting on it since the spring. He took it from me without looking up from the brass he was engraving, a compass rose for Nat Hurry's new skiff.

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Nat had gone for a course at the research station up the coast, and his letter was full of things he'd been told and didn't believe. The men there talked about atoms as though they were a harbour in miniature, with small hard things going round a central hull in rings that never quite touched. Each ring ended in a dot, Nat wrote, where a little charge sat like a buoy marking the channel. He'd drawn one on the back of a chart, and he'd put an anchor through the middle of it because, he said, that was the only way anyone in the room would understand why it held still.

Father read it twice, then pushed his spectacles up and laughed for the first time that week. He pinned the drawing above the counter, beside the tide tables, and scratched a small mark where the dot of the southern ring met the anchor's shank. "That's where he'll come home to," he said. I didn't ask how he knew. Outside, the sacks were already being loaded onto the van, and the gulls were working the bins like they'd been told the same news.