Fine line black tattoo of an infinity symbol joined to an anchor on the side of a torso, with blue fabric along the bottom edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Infinity and anchor tattoo on the side torso

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink tattoo showing an infinity symbol with a dotted line running through it to a small anchor. The linework is thin and crisp, with solid black fills on the anchor and a dotted stroke for the chain or rope. The skin is warm toned and softly vignetted, with a blue fabric edge crossing the lower part of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Infinity Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Constance Vane would tell the new boy why Silas Pook kept a figure eight of tarred marline in his sea chest, so I told him myself the night before we lost the tide off Lundy.

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Silas was an Appledore man who married a girl from Bideford the summer before he shipped out for the Newfoundland banks. He came back with salt in his beard and a loop of rope spliced round the shank of a rusted anchor he'd taken for a debt. 'Ends never meet,' he said, 'so the sea can't tie you off.' He never explained the anchor. He only ran his thumb along the twist of it when the weather turned.

The gale came up off Hartland Point at four bells. The Constance Vane dragged her hook, and Silas went forward with a hatchet to cut the cable before she drove onto the rocks. The hatchet stuck in the bitts. He went over with the chain, and the marline was the only thing of his the water gave back, a week later, washed up at Clovelly with its slack eye still closed.

The new boy asked what the eight meant once I'd finished. I told him it was the shape a ship draws when she goes out, comes home, and goes out again, which is no shape at all if you keep your eye on the water. Then I cut a length from my own lanyard and spliced it through the loop, so that when the wind came round I'd have something to hold that was still going round with me.