Matching anchor and quote tattoos on ankles

"You be the anchor," Nell said, not turning round. "You always are." She dragged the wooden bench nearer the door with her foot and sat on it, and Hester saw that the bench was the only thing holding down the back corner of the roof boards. The cook-shed had lifted twice that spring. Hester had tied stones to its corners and set a hook in the doorpost, and she had kept it all in place by never once leaving the yard.

Then a carter came in off the road, grey with dust, saying there was a wagon on its side in the gully three miles east, two mules still in the traces, and the gully was filling with grit. Hester did not hesitate. She threw the rope to Nell, who caught it and went up the ladder to the roof ridge where the wind was strongest. She tied the far end to the kite-pole and let the wind take the kite up over the gully, so Hester could walk the line across hand over hand while Nell paid out slack from above and held her ground against the gusts.

They got the mules out before dark. That night Hester sat on the bench with her boots off, and Nell sat on the roof edge with her feet hanging over the yard, and neither of them said which of them had been the anchor. In the morning the wind dropped and the kite came down into the yard like a bird that had changed its mind. Nell laughed, climbed down, and tied it to the post beside her sister's hook.