Small black fine line tattoo of an anchor with a heart and cross on the back of an ankle, with a denim trouser hem and sandal visible.

Anchor, heart and cross on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of an anchor with a heart threaded on its shank and a cross above the heart, drawn in thin, slightly uneven lines. The design sits on the back of the ankle, photographed from the side with a faded, vintage-style filter. The ink is solid black with no colour, and the composition is centred on the tattoo with a denim hem and sandal at the edges of the frame.

Fine line Ankle Anchor Heart Cross

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came sideways off the harbour that Saturday, so the stalls along Quay Street emptied by ten and only Mr Pargeter and I stayed put under our tarpaulins. He sold ship's bells and cracked lamps. I sold odd buttons, reels of waxed thread and a box of mismatched thimbles, and nobody wanted any of it in weather like that.

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Around eleven a boy came splashing up from the slipway with a dog-eared chart of the bay tucked under his jumper. He wanted sixpence for it. I gave him a shilling because the chart had a pencilled mark at the mouth of the river, gone over three times, as if whoever made it was afraid the lines would wash away before anyone read them.

The boy said his grandad had drawn it for a woman who kept a lamp burning in the window of the net loft. On the back, in pencil gone silver, was an anchor with a heart threaded on its shank and a small cross standing over the heart like a mast. Pargeter came round the side of his stall, looked at it for a long time, and said the Constance Mary had gone out in the January gale with four men aboard, and that the widow had marked her husband's charts the same way every year after, so anyone rowing in blind would know which way was home.

The boy didn't know any of that. He only knew the chart had lived in a biscuit tin under his grandad's bed. When the rain eased to a drizzle I taped it to the post under my awning, heart side out, and left my lamp lit a while longer than I needed to, in case anyone was still looking for the way in.