Mirror selfie of a person with a black and grey anchor tattoo on the upper arm, plus tattoos across the chest, forearm and stomach, with a teal-toned design on the other arm.

Anchor and chest tattoos in a mirror selfie

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A mirror selfie shows a person wearing a black strappy harness top, with the face hidden behind a pink phone case. Visible tattoos include a black and grey anchor on the upper arm, a heart-shaped design with lace-like detailing on the chest, and linework across the forearms and stomach. A teal-coloured design on the left arm adds colour, while the rest of the ink is mostly grey and black, set against a bedroom background.

Traditional Chest Upper arm Forearm Anchor Heart Floral Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up out of the Humber mud on a grey Tuesday, furred with weed and rust, and Dad wouldn't let anyone touch it until he'd sat on the quay wall and looked at it for an hour. We all knew the shape. Grandad Eli had worn one just like it on his upper arm for as long as anyone could remember, black and grey, the flukes curling like a pair of tired hands. He got it at a parlour behind the fish market in 1958, from a man called Shiner who worked with a machine he'd built out of a sewing motor and a biro spring.

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The heart on his chest was Nan's doing. She had a lace shawl pattern pinned to the kitchen wall, and one night she drew a heart in the middle of it on the back of a tea towel and made him take it to Shiner. Grandad said it hurt more than the anchor and that he'd sooner have had her name, but she said a man who went out on the trawlers needed something on him that wasn't a boat, and that was that.

The boat was the Ruth Ellen. She went out in February 1963 and didn't come back, and Grandad never went to sea again, though he kept her warp rope coiled in the shed for thirty years. When Dad finally rinsed the anchor under the outside tap, there were initials scratched into the shank with the point of a knife: E.H. and, beneath, R.H. with a small heart cut between them, crooked, like someone had been in a hurry or shaking.

Dad didn't say anything. He carried it up the garden and hung it on the nail above the back door, where Grandad used to hang his cap, and we left it there, weed still clinging to one fluke, while the kettle went on and the light came slanting through the kitchen window across the lace of the old shawl Nan had never finished.