Five black line drawings of anchors, each with a heart on the shaft or ring, arranged on a white background as tattoo flash designs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five anchor and heart designs

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows five separate anchor designs drawn in black on a white background. Some have an open heart at the crown or shaft, while others have a solid filled heart, and the lines vary in weight. The anchors are spaced in a scattered layout with no colour, shading or body placement shown.

Anchor Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was at the Grand Hotel on the front, the same ballroom where the Year Eleven prom had been, although the carpet had been replaced with something the colour of weak tea. Marjorie Pell arrived early and found the name badges laid out alphabetically on a trestle table, her own printed in a font that made her look like a stranger. Someone had written Anchor under it in biro, a nickname from the sailing club that had lasted one summer and never quite left.

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She had kept a single sketch all these years, folded in the back of a Latin primer. Five anchors, drawn on the back of a dinner menu at the chip shop on Pier Road, each with a heart tucked where the shank crossed the stock. Danny Okafor had drawn them while they waited for the lifeboat crew to finish their tea, claiming the hearts were a navigational device for finding your way home. Nobody had believed him, least of all Marjorie, who had thought him a show-off with ink on his cuffs.

Danny did not come. His sister came instead, carrying a shoebox. Inside were the original five anchors, cut out and laminated, and a note in his handwriting: the open hearts were for the people who had left, and the solid ones for the people who stayed. Marjorie counted them twice. She had always assumed the solid one was his, and now she could not tell whether he had meant it as a kindness or a warning.

She pinned the badge to her coat and went to find the bar, where the sea was visible through the window, grey and unhurried, and she realised she had been waiting for it to say something back.