Close-up of a small black fine line tattoo of an anchor with a heart on the side of a finger, held up between another hand.

Anchor and heart on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of an anchor with a cross at the top and a heart shape wrapped around the shank, drawn in thin black linework. It sits on the side of a finger, which is held up in a triangular pose against a dark background and a red surface. The ink is solid black with no shading, and the design fills only a small part of the frame.

Fine line Hand Anchor Heart Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold it still, Tommy, or the line goes crooked. Nell Garrow licked the end of the twine, pulled the knot tight, and nodded at the pencil on the net-loft bench. The boy had been trying to draw an anchor on the back of a cork float for an hour, and every one came out like a fishhook with ideas above its station. "Start with the cross," she said. "Every anchor's got one at the top, a stock to keep it lying flat on the bottom when the tide wants it up."

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"That's not a cross, it's a tree," said Tommy.

"It's a cross because I say so, and I've been mending nets since before your mam had her teeth." She tapped the shank with her thumbnail. "Now the heart. It goes round the shank, not in front of it, like a rope round a bollard. Holding on."

"Hearts don't hold anything."

She did not answer him. She was thinking of the March gale three winters back, when the Ellen May came in without her skipper, and of the cross the men had scratched on the chapel bench in his memory. The heart she had kept for herself, and for the boy's mother, who had stood on the harbour wall until the lamps went out.

Tommy finished the drawing without asking again. The heart came out lopsided, more like a boot, and he looked up for approval. Nell turned the cork to the lamp and said it would do, which in her mouth was the highest praise going. Then she hung it on the nail above the door where the wind could find it, and the smell of tar came in off the quay and settled over both of them.