Black and grey photo of a thin black line tattoo on an arm, showing a heart outline with a vertical line and a bar above, and arrow shapes below, in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart and arrow line tattoo on an arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a single tattoo on bare skin: an outlined heart with a vertical line running through it, a short horizontal bar above, and two angled strokes with arrowheads spreading out from the base. The linework is thin and even, in solid black with no shading. The image is greyscale and the tattoo sits centrally against a plain skin background.

Fine line Upper arm Heart Arrow Cross Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook Maren Hollis kept the galley fire banked on the long run north, because a cold stove made for a sour watch. The Thessaly Rose was four days out of Hull and the men had stopped asking for songs, so Maren gave them the one about the anchor that wanted a heart.

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The anchor lay in the silt of a grey harbour, its flukes spread wide like a man stretching after sleep. Every morning it watched the gulls cross the bay, and every evening it felt the boats lift and leave it behind. It had been forged to hold fast and nobody had ever asked what it wanted to hold. Then one winter a fishwife's daughter came down the slipway with a bucket of herring heads, sat on the wet stones and sang to the gulls, and the anchor, which had only ever heard chain and weather, found its shank had begun to lean towards her.

Maren tapped the ladle on the rim of the pot. The fire ticked. She said the anchor pulled itself out of the mud one cold morning, its chain singing like a struck bell, and walked up the slip on its flukes, which was no way for an anchor to behave, and asked the girl whether she would have it.

She said no, at first. She said an anchor was a poor thing to keep in a cottage. But it stayed on her step all the same, and by spring she had hung it above her door with a tin heart nailed through the middle, so that everyone who came in had to duck beneath the pair of them.