Black ink anchor tattoo on a forearm, with rope forming a heart around the shank and dotwork shading on the crown and lower chevron.

Anchor wrapped in a rope heart on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink anchor runs down the forearm, with a rope wrapped around the shank to form a heart shape and a rope coil hanging from the base. The linework is bold and even, and dotwork stippling fills the ring at the top of the anchor and the diamond shape near the bottom. The image is a close, straight-on photo against a pale skin tone and a light background.

Dotwork Traditional Forearm Anchor Rope Heart Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The well froze again the week after Candlemas, and Ada Venn went out to the lane with the bucket and found the rope no use to her. It was the old hemp her husband had bought off a Bristol carrier years before, stiff now, and it would not coil. She stood in the yard with the loops over her arm and swore at it under her breath, the way Tom had taught her, so the hens would not learn the words.

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Tom's anchor lay by the trough where he had left it when he came home from the sea. It was the one from the Sallie Ann, rusted to the colour of a fox, and he had never been able to bring himself to sell it. Ada dragged it to the kitchen step, wound the rope round the shank, and tied the two ends into a heart at the crossing so the bight would not slip. Jack Pell from the next farm saw it through the gate and said a rope heart on an anchor was how a sailor told a wife he did not mean to drown on dry land. She told him to mind his own cows.

That night the frost was so hard the fence posts cracked like musket shots. Ada tied the rope to the bucket handle and lowered the anchor down the shaft instead, letting its weight drop through the skin of ice. She heard it break, a sound like a plate going, and then the rope went slack and she hauled it up hand over hand until the water came up dripping and clear.

In the morning the anchor sat on the windowsill with its heart of rope still knotted at the shank, one coil hanging loose over the edge. Ada left it there and filled the kettle from the well.