Fine line black tattoo of an anchor with a dotted infinity loop, with a trail of birds rising toward the shoulder.

Anchor and birds across chest and shoulder

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of an anchor sits on the upper chest, with a dotted infinity loop wrapping around its shank. A flock of small birds in flight trails from the anchor up and over the shoulder. The linework is thin and mostly unshaded, and the soft-focus photo is cropped at the chin and collarbone against a dark blue background.

Fine line Chest Shoulder Anchor Infinity Dotted line Bird Flock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mab had counted the gulls off the Tollerby breakwater for thirty-one autumns, and every year the total came out different, which she blamed on the wind. Her brother Ned had sailed on the Corrie Lass the spring he turned nineteen. The boat came home. Ned did not, and the harbourmaster never could say which wave had taken him, only that the anchor chain had been let run out to its last link.

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The anchor came back in a crate with the Lass's effects, rust-scaled and heavier than it had any right to be. Mab took it to Hector Frew, who tattooed out of the back room of the chandlery and smelled permanently of linseed. She asked for a loop of dots wrapping the shank, the way the rope had looped when it ran. "Dotted, so it's not finished," she said. Hector drew it three times before she was satisfied. He asked nothing about the birds she wanted climbing up and over the shoulder, only that they lift away from the anchor so they looked like they were leaving on purpose.

Every October after that, the gulls came in from the north over the cliffs and settled on the breakwater, and Mab stood with her collar up and counted them. Nineteen one year, forty the next. The fishermen said they were Ned's crew, which made her laugh, though she never told them she counted the way he used to count knots in a line, touching each one twice.

The last autumn she could still manage the slipway, a single gull landed on the anchor's flukes in the harbour mud and stayed there while the tide came up around it. Mab did not count it. She just said, "There you are," and went home to put the kettle on.