Colour tattoo of a grey anchor with a red-accented cross and a beaded line running down the wrist, on a forearm raised in a thumbs up.

Anchor and cross with beads on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded anchor sits on the forearm with a small cross threaded through its shank, and a strand of red and purple beads drapes from the cross down towards the wrist. Red star tattoos are partly visible at the left edge of the frame, and a line of small text sits above the anchor. The arm is held up against a dark red background, with the hand giving a thumbs up.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chain had been running out for ten minutes before Dessie Cole thought to wake the skipper. Wind came off the headland in long shoves, and the Brenda Vane swung her stern towards the breakwater like a dog that had spotted a cat. Cole stood at the windlass in his socks, one hand on the brake lever and the other working a string of beads he kept in his jacket pocket, the red and purple ones his gran had threaded for him before she went into the home.

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Skipper Hal Maddox came up the companionway with his oilskins half on and took one look at the slack line. "Bottom's sand, not rock," he said, which was meant to be comfort. They paid out another fathom. The cross threaded through the shank caught the deck light as the anchor broke the surface, and Cole thought, not for the first time, that a man ought to have something like that in his hand if the sea was going to have him anyway.

The anchor bit at last, a long shudder through the hull, and the boat stopped her drift a cable short of the wall. Nobody cheered. Maddox lit two cigarettes and passed one over without asking, which Cole took as the closest thing to thanks he'd get before breakfast.

At first light they hauled up the anchor, which had come up with a crab clinging to one fluke and a rag of weed in the crown. Cole unlooped the beads from the shank, where he'd hung them so they wouldn't tangle, and walked them back into his pocket. The rosary went back where it lived, and the boat rode quiet on the flood.

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