Two small fine line black tattoos, a ship's wheel on one heel and an anchor on the other foot, shown on bare feet against a dark leather surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ship's wheel and anchor on two feet

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet rest on a dark leather surface, each with a small tattoo on the heel. The left foot has a tiny ship's wheel drawn in thin black linework, and the right foot has a small anchor in similarly fine, single-weight lines. Both designs are solid black ink with no shading or colour, and they sit in the lower part of the frame with plenty of empty space around them.

Fine line Other Ship's wheel Anchor

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Porthgwidden expected the Marigold to make it past the bar that night, least of all Ned, who had spent the afternoon swearing the glass was steady. Dilys had the wheel. She had held it since the spring their father's hands went stiff, and she gripped the spokes the way some people grip a grudge, certain that letting go would be the thing that sank them.

Keep reading

The sea came over the stern in a grey sheet and filled the wheelhouse to the shins. Ned was in the well on his back, hauling on the chain of the old Danforth they kept for emergencies and never tested. "Drop it," she shouted, though she had meant to shout something kinder. "We're not at the mark." "If we don't hold here," he called back, "we'll be on the Shags by six, and you can explain that to Mam."

They dropped it in the lee of the Stack, where the bottom was sand and weed and forgiving. The chain ran out with a noise like a dropped piano, the hull swung, shuddered, and turned its bow into the wind as if it had remembered something important. Ned sat up coughing, salt in his eyebrows. Dilys stood at the wheel with the spokes slick under her palms and found she could not make her fingers open.

In the morning the anchor still hung off the bow, rust blooming on its flukes, and neither of them mentioned who had been frightened. The week after, they walked up to the tattooist above the harbour wall and came back with two small marks: a wheel for her, an anchor for him. Neither of them ever said why. They didn't need to. Each knew which of them would be steering, and which would be holding on.