Black and grey anchor inside an ornate circular frame with dotted chains and drop pendants, tattooed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor in an ornate frame on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A ship's anchor sits inside a circular medallion framed by scrolling baroque ornament. Below the frame, dotted chains hang down to small tapered drop shapes. The work is in black ink and grey tones, with fine outlines and stippled dots, and the design is centred on the forearm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cloth on the trestle table has gone soft with rain, and the man in the next booth is already shouting about the coconuts. You have a single brass medallion in your palm, warm from being held, and the anchor stamped inside it has worn so smooth you can barely tell which way is up. Mr Achterberg, who runs the swingboats, swore it came off a Grimsby trawler that went down in the fifties. You don't believe him, but you pay him two shillings anyway.

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The fair moves to Boston on Monday, then to Spalding, and every night you fasten the thing to a length of beaded chain and hang it from the tent pole where the lamp catches it. Customers ask if it's lucky. You tell them it's like any anchor: it holds you still long enough to look at what's around you. The scrollwork round its rim you have worked over with vinegar and a rag until the lace of it shows again.

In October the big wheel seizes at the top with a girl in one of the cars, and you are the one who climbs up with a spanner and a rope round your waist. You don't look down. You count the dots on the chain instead, forty-one of them, the little drops at the bottom swinging like plumb lines. When she is safe on the ground, crying into her mother's coat, Achterberg presses the medallion back into your hand and says he never wanted it returned.

You hang it on the pole again that night. For once, the anchor doesn't swing at all.

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