Close-up of a hand holding red and white twine, with a teal and black lettering and anchor design on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Lettering and anchor on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A hand holding a wooden spool of red and white twine shows a small design on the inner wrist. The design combines teal and black lettering reading Sarah's last sail before the veil, with a dark anchor beside the text. The lines are clean and the colour is flat, and it appears to be a temporary transfer-style tattoo against a plain grey background.

Lettering Forearm Anchor Lettering Text Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are not meant to take the novices past the buoy, and Sister Ruth has told you so twice this week, but Agnes Tull has asked for one last sail before her veil, and you have never once managed to refuse a girl who asks you properly. So you untie the dinghy from the steps below the abbey wall and let the ebb carry you out past the gull-white rocks of Skerrow Holm.

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She sits in the stern with a spool of red and white twine in her lap, winding it round two fingers while the wind comes up off the Race. The sail is the old one your father patched with flour sacking, and it snaps every time she laughs. She wants to know which knot holds a boat against the tide. You show her the bowline, then the clove hitch, then the sheet bend your uncle learned from a Portuguese cook that nobody else on the island has ever tied properly. She gets it on the third try and looks as pleased as if she had painted the sky.

Beyond the last buoy she asks you to heave to. She takes the end of the twine, loops it once around your wrist, and ties it off with the bowline you just taught her. The other end she fastens to the ring of the anchor. "When the bell goes for vespers," she says, "haul me back by that." Then she rolls over the side into water so cold it stops your breath, and swims towards the steps with her habit floating round her like a dropped sail. You sit with the twine tight on your wrist and the anchor sliding slowly across the bottom of the boat, and you wait for the bell.