Small simple black tattoo of a cross, an anchor and a heart on the inner wrist, photographed close up.

Cross, anchor and heart on the wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three small black motifs sit in a diagonal line on the inner wrist: a Latin-style cross, an anchor with a ring at its top and a solid heart above. The lines are plain and even, with solid fills on the heart and clean strokes on the cross and anchor. The image is taken close up against a skin-toned background with a blurred room behind, and the tattoo is clearly in focus.

Forearm Cross Anchor Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry from Inishmor had been waiting at the slip since the tide turned, and Nell Garvey still hadn't found the bag of mail for the mainland. She stood on the stone quay with rain running off her hood, counting the crates twice because her uncle always counted them twice. Behind her the chapel bell gave its one flat note for the hour, and the gulls lifted off the harbour wall all at once, as if someone had shouted.

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Her uncle Tom had carved three marks into the transom of the Mary Ellen the winter before he died: a small cross, a plain anchor with its ring worn smooth by rope, and a heart above them, filled black with the tip of a nail. He said it was for faith, for getting home, and for whoever happened to be sitting in the stern. Nell had thought it sentimental until the morning she found the boat drifting half a mile out, its painter trailing, and understood the anchor had never been dropped at all.

Now she untied the line herself and stepped aboard, dragging the mail sack after her. The engine coughed, caught, and the island slid backward into fog. She steered by the sound of the bell until it faded, then by the swell under the hull, then by the smell of diesel and wet wool that meant the mainland was near. At the mouth of the sound she let the anchor go in shallow water to be sure of her position, and watched the chain run out through the fairlead.

When she hauled it up again, a folded paper was wedged in the flukes. It was addressed to her in her uncle's cramped capitals, and it said only: COUNT THE CRATES, THEN COUNT THE PEOPLE. She laughed aloud, alone on the grey water, and turned the boat for home.