Two small black fine line tattoos, a ship's wheel on one ankle and an anchor on the other, shown with blue canvas sneakers on a sofa.

Ship's wheel and anchor on both ankles

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two small black tattoos sit on the inner ankles of a pair of feet in blue canvas sneakers, a ship's wheel on the left foot and an anchor on the right. The linework is thin and even, with simple solid strokes and no shading. The ink is black against skin, and the warm, soft-focus background of a cream sofa and cushions sits behind the feet.

Fine line Ankle Ship's wheel Anchor Nautical Sneaker Feet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry's horn sounds twice across the car deck just as a passport slides under the glass of your booth. You open it and compare the photograph with the page, and the likeness is close enough to pass on a bad morning. Close enough is not the same as right, though, and after years in this booth you have learned that the difference usually shows in the small things.

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"Long crossing?" you ask, though the run from Dover takes barely ninety minutes. The reply is a shrug and a half-smile, the answer of someone who has spent more time on water than on land. Outside, the Calais quay lamps swing slowly in the wing mirror of a van as the ship settles against its ropes, and the tide pulls at the hull like an impatient dog.

You ask him to step aside. In the cabin the strip light buzzes while you pull up the records. The name on the screen belongs to a man reported lost off a Ramsgate trawler eleven years ago. The clerk in you wants to call it in. The sailor in you, the one your father drilled into you on the slipway, knows that a wheel turns whichever way it is set, and that an anchor only holds if someone chooses to let it down.

You stamp the page and hand the passport back. "Mind the step," you say. He nods, walks out into the lamplight, and is gone before the van rolls off. Only then do you find the thing he left under the glass, a small brass anchor on a loop of cord, still faintly warm. You close the drawer on it and keep it.