Small black anchor tattoo with a bow wrapped around its shank, sitting on the ankle beside a beaded anklet and charm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with bow on an ankle

Traditional · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small anchor with a bow tied around its shank sits on the side of the ankle, with a thin outline and solid dark fill. The design is shown in black ink with light shading on the ribbon. A layered leather and beaded anklet with a small charm sits above it, and a hand with red nail polish rests at the right edge against a grey pavement background.

Traditional Ankle Anchor Bow Ribbon Anklet Charm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell carried the anchor up from the shingle the spring the Mary Ann was lost, though nobody in Coldharbour Wood could tell her why a village forty miles from salt water needed a hook that size. The iron was rusted through at one fluke. Her father said it had come down the river on a barge, and her mother said it had come off a wreck that never existed. Nell stopped asking and tied it to the gatepost with a length of blue ribbon from the haberdasher's.

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Every Sunday after that she walked the path past the alders to the place where the trees gave out onto a field of nettles, and she hung the anchor from the crooked oak there. Old Tobias from the mill thought it foolish. The ribbon faded to the colour of weak tea, then to nothing, and each week she tied on a fresh one, double bowed, the way her grandmother had tied her boots.

By August the oak had grown a second skin of bark around the iron, and the village children had started calling the tree the Bow Tree. Nobody mentioned the Mary Ann any more. Nell found, to her surprise, that she no longer minded the mud on her hem or the nettle stings on her shins, because the ribbon was always there at the edge of the trees, a small blue mark that someone still watched the water.

Last week the wind dropped and an oar came up out of the mere below the field, grey and split down the middle. Nell carried it home across her shoulders and laid it beside the gatepost without a word. Her father looked at it for a long time, then went to find the ribbon spool.