Two people holding hands, each with a traditional-style anchor tattoo on the inner forearm, with black linework and orange-red accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching anchor tattoos on two forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms are shown with a matching pair of anchor tattoos, one larger and one smaller, each with bold black outlines and grey shading. The larger anchor has orange-red accents on its rope and flukes, and the smaller one has an orange-red bow wrapped around the shank. The photograph is taken outdoors by the sea, with the two people's hands clasped in the lower part of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Anchor Bow Hand Rope Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Penhallow had the anchor forged in Falmouth to the weight her husband specified, twelve hundredweight of grey iron, and then spent a whole winter pretending it was lighter than it was. Every morning she walked down to the slip to check the chain against the mooring post, and every morning Dan Corran told her the chain was fine and she should go home before the wind got into her coat.

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The second anchor was for the girl. Their daughter Tamsin was nine that spring and had decided the family boat needed a companion, a dinghy she named Little Bess, so a smaller anchor had to be found. The chandler in Mevagissey had only one that fitted, and it came with a scrap of orange cord someone had wound round its shank and forgotten. Tamsin tied a bow in it, double knotted, and declared that the bow was the important part, because it made the anchor a present and not a chore.

Dan laughed until he had to sit down on the bollard. Then he unpicked the cord, wound it through the rope of the big anchor instead, and the two of them argued about it until the tide turned and they had to haul the dinghy up the shingle together, one line each, the heavy anchor scoring a furrow behind it.

When the November gale tore the moorings loose, it was the small anchor that held. Tamsin found it wedged under a rock at low water, the bow still tight, and carried it home in both arms.