Black anchor tattoo with a heart-shaped loop and curling scrolls on the inside of a wrist, shown in a photo taken indoors.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with swirls on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black anchor sits on the inner wrist, with a heart-shaped loop threaded around the shank and curling scrolls rising above the crown. The linework is bold and even, and the shading is solid black with no greys or colour. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against pale skin, with a tiled floor and a chair visible in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the kettle, boy, it's still spitting from the last round. Leave the potatoes; they'll keep till the watch changes. Sit where I can see your face and I'll tell you how the Mirrin came to keep her anchor, because you've been staring at Ned Carrow's wrist for a week and asking me nothing about it, which is the sort of silence that wants filling.

Keep reading

Ned was bosun when I first signed on, and he had that anchor inked into his skin at a parlour in Hull the night before we sailed. Bet Carrow had threaded her wedding ring onto the cable the morning he left, a bit of ribbon through it, so the ring would go out to sea with him. He never told anyone the scrolls above the crown were meant as sea spray, but they were. He drew them himself on the back of a bill of lading.

The winter we lost the port anchor off the Lizard, the cable ran out so fast it took the skin off Ned's palms. He went forward through the green water with a bar and a lantern, and I stood in this very doorway with the stove gone cold, sure I'd be cooking his funeral tea by morning. He came back at dawn with his hands bleeding and the cable hauled in, and the ring still tangled in the shank loop where the ribbon had rotted through. He wouldn't cut it free. Said the sea had been given its toll already.

That ring hangs on a nail above the stove now, black with soot and polished at the edges where the cooks rub it for luck. Bet Carrow is buried in Hull. Ned is in the churchyard at St Mary's. Every time I light the ring hook I think how easy it would have been for the sea to take the lot, and how stubborn a man has to be to keep a heart on a chain. Now, pass me that flour. We've got twelve mouths and not much patience.

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