Small colour tattoo of a pink heart with a black and grey cross and anchor, sitting on the neck behind the ear.

Heart, cross and anchor behind the ear

Neck · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of a pink heart with a grey cross and anchor overlaid, outlined in black. The linework is bold and the pink fill is flat with light shading, and the cross sits in the centre of the heart with the anchor crossing beneath it. The tattoo is centred against soft skin behind the ear, with a little hair and an ear piercing visible at the edges of the frame.

Neck Heart Cross Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lighthouse keeper's widow on Skerra Holm kept the foghorn going for thirty winters, and when the new man from the mainland came over on the supply boat, he brought a sea chest with a brass cross bolted to the lid. Nobody asked what it was for. Mairi Gunn had buried a husband and two sons to the same cold water, and she knew a cross when she saw one, and she knew an anchor when she saw one too.

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The new keeper, Tom Ferrar, was a quiet man with a pink heart painted on the inside of his cap band where no one would see it. He wound the clockwork every four hours and wrote the weather in a ledger that smelled of paraffin. When the autumn gales came, the boat from Scrabster didn't come with them, and he stood at the rail with Mairi's grandson, passing the glass back and forth, saying nothing about the rope that had frayed through in the night.

They found the boat on the third morning, upturned on the skerries, and the anchor still tied fast to its bow. Tom lifted it from the shingle himself and carried it up the cliff path on his shoulder, though it weighed more than he did. He set it on the cairn beside the signal mast, and Mairi came up slowly with her stick and looked at it for a long time.

In spring she had the anchor hauled down to the harbour wall and a smith from Thurso cut a heart around the fluke. Tom asked her why. She said the sea would take what it liked, but a thing could be held onto by whoever was left standing at the wall.