Two small black anchor tattoos, one on each ankle, in simple fine line style, with a sandal and woven bracelets nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching anchor ankle tattoos

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet rest on a carpeted floor, each with a small black anchor tattoo placed on the ankle near the heel. The anchors are drawn in thin, simple black linework with no shading or colour. A partly visible tattoo of a star or flower-like motif sits higher on the left ankle, and the photograph is taken at a close angle with a sandal on the left foot.

Fine line Ankle Anchor Star Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The relief boat was late again, so I went down to the landing with the paraffin and the mail sack and found Nell Harker sitting on the bollard with her boots off, dabbing at her ankle with a rag. Her father had given her a sail needle and a saucer of ink the colour of wet slate, and she had been at it since breakfast. 'Don't look,' she said. 'It's meant to be a surprise, and it's crooked.'

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It was not crooked. It was a small anchor, the shank no longer than my thumbnail, with the flukes curled up like a pair of cupped hands. She had copied it from the brass plate on the lifeboat house, the one that came up on the rocks the winter the Mary Ellen went down. I told her she would get the sea in her blood and her mother would skin her. She laughed and said the anchor was for holding on, not for going.

I did mine that evening in the lamp room, with the wick turned low and the glass still warm, using Nell's needle and the last of the ink. My hand shook. The line wandered where hers had not. When I held my foot up to the lantern it looked like something a child had scratched on a slate, which is what it was.

The relief boat came in three days later with a new keeper for the south light and a letter for Nell, which she read on the steps and folded very small. She did not say what was in it. She only tucked her foot under her skirt, and we stood there while the tide came in over the old mooring ring, and neither of us looked down at the other.