Two people holding hands show matching traditional anchor tattoos on their forearms, each with orange accents and a rope detail.

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Matching anchor tattoos on two forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are clasped together, with a black traditional anchor tattoo on each person's forearm near the wrist. The left anchor has orange flukes and a ring at the top, while the right anchor has a bow-like rope wrapped around its shank with orange and black shading. The background is a blurred sea and the second person wears a dark patterned top.

Traditional Forearm Anchor Rope Bow Matching tattoo Hand Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came off the cart still hot enough to hiss when Mrs Pascoe dropped it in the trough, and she swore at it the way she swore at the tide. Tom Venn had cut the shank from a ship's spare, and the bow was Ada's idea, a strip of oilcloth she had twisted into a loop and tied at the crown the morning her brother's boat went out without him. 'It'll hold,' she said. 'Tie it like you mean it.'

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Tom did not make anything he could not measure, so he filed the flukes twice and checked them against the square until they sat level. Two anchors went out of that forge that winter, one plain for the Mary Jane and one with the ribbon for the Kittiwake, which Ada had named after the bird that followed her father's boat home every evening for thirty years.

When the spring gales came, the Kittiwake dragged her moorings on the outer bar and the crew were pulled off by the lifeboat in the grey before dawn. The plain anchor was found wedged under a rock at low water, still holding the Mary Jane steady in the lee of the harbour wall. Nobody remembered who had asked for the ribbon, only that it was still on the Kittiwake's anchor when it was hauled up from the mud a month later, the oilcloth gone black and stiff with salt.

Ada hung that anchor above the forge door and never took the ribbon off. Tom said it was ugly. She said a thing that had been through the sea had earned its ugliness.