Lettering arranged into an anchor shape on hip

The Margaret Ann came into Whitby in the autumn of 1887 with her foremast gone and a blacksmith's boy aboard who could not read a word. He'd been pressed off a Hull dock with a pocketful of nails and a mother who wrote him letters he never once managed to open. Every night in the forecastle he'd turn the bosun's Bible upside down and pretend. The men laughed at him. Old Hatfield laughed hardest, and then one night he chalked the whole alphabet on the hatch cover and made the boy say it back. By the Azores the lad could spell his own name.

When the cable parted off the Dogger, it was that same boy who went down the chain with a hammer, and he never came up dry. They brought the anchor home mangled, and he spent a winter at a forge on the Whitby quay beating it straight again. He wouldn't let anyone make it plain. He worked every name of the crew into the iron, letters folded through one another so tight you couldn't tell where one ended and the next began. Twenty-two of them. Hatfield's went first, and his own went last, right at the point where the iron bites the ground.

Now you'll say it's only scrollwork. Go on, trace it with your finger from the shank outwards. Read it slow. You'll find Hatfield near the top, and you'll find the lad at the bottom, holding fast.