Pencil sketch of a shaded anchor with a feather wound around its shank, drawn as a tattoo design on plain white paper.

Anchor with feather wrapped around the shaft

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an anchor with a crossbar, ring at the top and curved flukes at the base. A feather with fine barbs wraps diagonally around the shank and is shaded with soft grey tones and dark outlines. The subject sits centrally on a plain white background, with no skin or body part visible.

Anchor Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top had been folding itself smaller every winter, and by November the Halloran Brothers' Travelling Show was down to one working ring and a ringmaster who did his sums on the back of programmes. Ada counted the guy ropes again on the sea wall at Seaton while the wind came in off the Channel with grit in it. The anchor was the old one from the mooring rig, too heavy to sell and too stubborn to throw away, and she had been sent to sink it in the shingle to hold the north pole.

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Her cockatoo, Mister Pim, had been sold in September to a man from Bristol who promised him a glass aviary. Before he went, he had moulted a long grey feather onto the rigging, and she picked it up without thinking and wound it round the shank with a length of sisal, the way she once wound ribbons into her hair for the high wire. It looked like a joke. It also held.

Dodd, the strongman, came down the slipway with the hand-cart and asked why she was dressing a rusty hook. She said it was for luck, and he laughed, then stopped laughing, because luck was the only thing the show had left that nobody charged them for. They lowered it together, the feather trailing up towards the pole like a flag nobody had asked for.

That night the wind swung round and the canvas cracked against its pegs like rifle fire. In the morning the feather was still there, bent flat but whole, the only thing on the seafront that had not blown away. Ada tied the last knot, and the show went on, smaller.