Black linework tattoo on the inner wrist of a forearm showing an outlined heart with a cross, two birds above and an anchor hanging below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart, cross and anchor on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an outlined heart with a cross inside its left curve, two small bird silhouettes perched above, and an anchor suspended from the heart's tip by a thin connecting line. The lines are solid black and of even weight, with no shading. The photograph is taken straight on against a pale background, with the design sitting centrally on the inner wrist.

Forearm Heart Cross Bird Anchor Outline

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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

Come in under the awning, the lot of you, and shake your coats. Rain has never yet drowned a story worth the telling, and this one is older than the market's tin roof and twice as stubborn.

Keep reading

Down on the Saltmarket in Dunmouth, where the gulls fight over herring heads, there lived a rope-maker's daughter called Nell Aske. She had a sweetheart named Tom Pellow, who crewed the Mary Ellen out past the bar. Every morning before the fish carts rattled in, Nell tied a length of tarred line to the iron cross above the chapel gate, and she knotted the other end to a little anchor she had carved from driftwood. Tom swore he would tie that line to her heart before the first frost. Foolish, the women said. Nell only laughed and wound the line tighter.

Then came the autumn gale, and the Mary Ellen did not come home. For three days the rain fell sideways across the quay, and Nell stood at the gate with her hands raw from the wet rope. On the third morning two grey birds came down and perched on the chapel wall above her, singing as though they had news. She followed them up the headland, and there below the cliff was the Mary Ellen's mast poking from the shallows. Tom stood on the rocks beside it, holding a lantern that had not gone out.

And that, my friends, is why the anchor hangs from the heart by a single thin line, with the birds perched above to keep watch. Tom said the sea had taken enough from them already, and he would not let it take the promise as well. Now mind the wet on the cobbles as you go.