Black and grey traditional anchor tattoo with a rope wrapped around the shaft, a heart at the centre and a flower at the base, on the inner wrist.

Anchor, rope and heart on the inner wrist

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A traditional-style anchor fills most of the frame, with a rope wrapped around its shaft and a shaded heart sitting at the centre of the cross. A decorative flower or rosette forms the base of the anchor, and the outlines are bold and dark. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey with soft gradient shading on the anchor arms and shaft, and it is photographed straight on against a plain skin background.

Traditional Forearm Anchor Rope Heart Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferryman at Saltmere Crossing had one rule, and he repeated it to every traveller who came down to the grey water with a bundle and a hopeful face. You may carry what you can hold in your hands, and you may not carry what your hands are holding back from. Most people thought this a riddle. Old Tamsin Rooke, who kept the lantern at the far bank, thought it was simply the truth, and she said so to anyone who would listen.

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One autumn a young weaver came down with a coil of rope over her shoulder, thick and tarred, and a small iron anchor tied to the end of it. The ferryman looked at the rope and then at the anchor and shook his head. The weaver said she had not come to cross. She had come to leave something on the near shore, and she needed the boat to carry the weight of it out past the reeds, where the water went black and still.

He rowed her out. At the deep place she knelt in the boat and worked the knot loose, and she did not drop the anchor. Instead she bent over it and pressed her thumb hard into the iron crown, the way a mother presses a splinter, and said a name nobody caught. Then she wrapped the rope three times around the shank, slow and neat, and tucked a small carved heart of pale wood into the loop where the stock met the arm. The ferryman understood then that it was a promise she was tying, not a grief she was dropping.

When they reached the lantern bank, Tamsin was waiting with the light raised. She looked at the weaver's wrist, where a thin line of ink had been pricked that morning, and she laughed quietly. "Well," she said, "now you can cross, and now you are carried."