Black and grey fine line tattoo of an anchor with a small circle at the top and a leaf shape on the shank, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line anchor on the forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single continuous black line forms an anchor with a small ring at the top, a leaf-like mark along the shank, and curved flukes ending in small dots. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the design is shown in black ink on pale skin. The photograph is taken close up in a soft, even light with the forearm filling most of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Anchor Leaf Line art Nautical

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Skerry Bay could draw a straight line after the war, Mrs Halloran said, so when the new schoolmaster arrived with a pen that never lifted from the page, the children crowded round his desk to watch. He drew an anchor in one stroke for them, starting at the ring on top and not stopping until the flukes curled back toward the shank, and the whole room held its breath as if the thing might drag the floorboards out to sea.

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Old Tom Penrose watched from the back row. He had been a deckhand on the Morwenna before she broke on the Crake, and he knew her anchor better than he knew his own hands, because it had been his job to haul it up every morning for six years. He told the master the drawing was wrong. An anchor was iron that had to bite, he said, and a line alone would only drift.

The schoolmaster laughed and added a leaf along the shank for luck. Tom did not laugh. That night he walked down to the slipway with a lantern and found the Morwenna's old anchor lying in the shallows where the spring tide had left it, its flukes furred with weed. He dragged it up the shingle a foot at a time, and by the time he reached the top road his shoulders were raw and the lantern had gone out.

In the morning the children found it outside the schoolhouse door, sitting square on the step with the rust still running from it. Nobody knew who had carried it up. The schoolmaster looked at it for a long time, then took his pen from his pocket and, very carefully, traced around the iron, so that the drawing and the thing sat one on top of the other and neither could be told from the other by anyone who was not looking closely.