Geometric tattoo of an anchor in faceted blue and grey shading on the upper arm of a person wearing a black top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Faceted blue anchor on an upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large anchor sits on the outer upper arm, with its shank, ring and flukes built from angular, faceted panels. The shading moves through several blues, from deep navy to pale grey-blue, with thin light lines marking the anchor's structure. The photograph is taken straight on against a pale wall, with the tattoo filling most of the arm.

Geometric Upper arm Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up the pass on the back of a grey mule called Tuesday, wrapped in sailcloth and cursing every switchback it met. Nobody in Sallow Gap had ever seen the sea, so nobody knew what to do with a thing dragged out of it. Old Harker said it belonged to the Vennick brothers, who had lost a boat off the Cornish coast in a blow the winter before I was born, and who had apparently decided the iron should be kept where no wave could reach it.

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I walked beside her the whole way, past the last cairn where the air goes thin and the stream runs blue as cut glass over the stones. The flukes knocked against the rock with every step, and the ice at the edges of the puddles had edges like the thing itself, angled and sharp. Harker had sent a boy with a letter for the widow, but the boy turned back at the snowline and I did not blame him.

At the tarn I unlashed it. The water was so still it held the peaks upside down, navy in the depths and pale as skimmed milk where the sky touched the surface. I set the anchor on a shelf of granite and it sat there as if it had always meant to arrive. Tuesday refused to go within a rope's length of the edge, and I think she was right.

I came down with an empty pack and a lighter step than I expected. Harker asked whether the widow had wept. I told him she had only asked how the water looked, and that I had said it looked like something that had finally stopped moving.