Two inner wrists held together, each with a black anchor tattoo with a red ribbon wrapped around its shank, in a traditional style on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching anchor tattoos on two wrists

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two people hold hands so that their inner wrists meet, and each wrist carries a black anchor tattoo. The anchors have bold outlines, solid black fills and a red ribbon wrapped around the shank, with shading used sparingly on the flukes. The soft, slightly warm photograph is framed square with the hands filling the lower part of the image.

Traditional Forearm Anchor Ribbon Wrist Hand Couple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The heat came up through the floor of the cab like something with a grudge, and Nell still wouldn't let me switch the fan to high. "That's the cold air we've got left," she said, "and I'm not spending it on you." We'd been hauling salt along the Sallow Flats for three summers, two hundred miles of white nothing between Greywater and the coast, and by July we had run out of things to say that weren't about tyres.

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The truck gave up at the twelfth milepost, just as the sun slid behind the ridge. Nell got out with the torch and I followed with the jack, and we stood in the orange light staring at the axle as if it might explain itself. Neither of us wanted to be the first to say we were stuck. So we held hands, the way we did in crowds and at bus stops, two inked anchors meeting at the wrist, and waited for the far lights of a convoy that never came.

An old man in a flatbed pulled up at midnight with a jerrycan and a length of braided rope. He looked at our wrists, then at the truck, and said the trouble with anchors was that people forgot they were for tying off, not for holding on. Nell laughed at him. I didn't. He hitched us to his bed and dropped us at the depot without taking a penny.

By dawn the red ribbon round the shank of my anchor looked like the only colour left on the flats. Nell was asleep against the window, her fingers still hooked through mine, and I let her sleep while I worked out which of us had been holding on and which of us had been tied.