Traditional-style tattoo of a red and white lifebuoy ringed by a dark chain outline, on the outer ankle of a foot resting in a pink flip-flop.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red lifebuoy tattoo on an ankle

Traditional · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A red lifebuoy ring with pale stripes sits at the centre of the image, framed by a thin black chain-link border that loops around it. The ring has bold black outlining and simple shading, with the chain drawn in fine grey-black lines. The tattoo is shown on an ankle against bright green artificial grass, with the foot resting in a pink flip-flop.

Traditional Ankle Ring Chain Nautical Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ring came ashore on the morning after the blow, wedged in the wrack below the slipway at Skerrow. It was red once, striped with paint the salt had chewed to the colour of bread crust, and a length of rusted chain still trailed from its rim. Dougal Rennie said it had come off the Mary Grace, which had gone down past the Stacks with nine men aboard, and that nobody was to touch it. Annis Corrie touched it anyway, because her brother Tam had been mate on that boat and nobody had yet told her he was dead.

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The island kept its own rules about the sea. A thing the sea had given back could not be taken off the island, and a thing it had taken could not be asked for twice. So Annis hung the ring on the nail beside the church door and wound the chain round it three times. Every evening she stood under it and counted the boats coming in. Eight came home that spring. None was the Mary Grace, and none carried Tam, and the women of Skerrow began to say the ring was waiting for something to be given back.

In June a boy called Ewan Scobie fell from the breakwater and went under. Annis ran down the slipway with the ring in both arms and threw it, chain and all, into the darkest water. The sea took the chain and sent the ring back flat across the swell, and the boy came up gasping on the far side of it, holding the red stripes with both hands.

Annis never went back to the nail. Some say she gave the ring to Ewan's mother, and some say it still hangs there, rusted down to a single loop. What the island agrees on is that Dougal stopped telling people not to touch things, and that the chain was never found again, so the sea must have kept something for itself.