Lettering tattoo shaped like an anchor with a blue word and red heart on the inner forearm, in black and grey with small colour accents.

Anchor made of lettering on an inner forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo spells out a quotation in handwritten-style lettering arranged in the shape of an anchor, with the words running down the shaft and curving along the crown. Linework is clean and dark, with a small blue word at the top, a purple word in the middle and a red heart at the base of the curve. The photograph shows the tattoo on a pale inner forearm against a plain background with some furniture visible at the edge.

Lettering Forearm Anchor Lettering Quote Heart Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The winter the sea took the lower quay at Scarth, Idony the ferrymaster's girl began stitching wings from sailcloth and whalebone, and the whole town said she would drown in them. Her husband Tam only mended nets and said less. Everyone agreed he was the sensible one, the weight the village stood on.

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For two summers she tested the wings from Gullet Head, where the wind came up the cliff face like a held breath. Every evening Tam sat on the wet rock with the tether wrapped twice around his forearm and his boots dug into the shale. "You be the anchor," Idony told him, pulling her straps tight, "and I'll be the wings." He said wings were only borrowed weather, and anything borrowed had to be given back.

In the first week of October the wind swung east without warning. Idony lifted off with the tether paying out through Tam's hands, past the flooded church, past the bell tower with its gulls, out over the grey water where the old road ran under. The cord burned through his palms. He did not let go. When the gust died she hung above the drowned village, too far to call, and for a long moment neither of them moved.

Then the line went taut and he hauled, hand over hand, the way he hauled nets, and she came down onto the rock beside him, shaking, laughing, her wings folded like a hymnbook. He tied a red knot in the tether's end, the colour of the buoys that marked the channel, and they walked home without speaking. Nobody in Scarth ever called him sensible again, though it was the sensible thing he did.