Two black and grey tattoos on forearms: a ship's wheel with the script 'Be the one to guide me' on the left, and a shaded anchor with a chain and the script 'but never hold me down' on the right.

Ship's wheel and anchor script tattoos on forearms

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two side-by-side tattoos on forearms show a shaded ship's wheel with script reading 'Be the one to guide me' on the left arm, and a shaded anchor wrapped in chain with script reading 'but never hold me down' on the right. The wheel and anchor use soft grey shading and fine highlights, while the lettering is bold black script. The tattoos are rendered entirely in black and grey ink against plain skin, with the two arms placed close together.

Lettering Realism Forearm Ship wheel Anchor Chain Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chandler at Scarrow Quay sold us two fathoms of tarred line and told us it was for mooring, not for tying anyone down. Ada laughed at that. I pretended I hadn't heard, because I had already decided to ask her something on the walk back up the hill and didn't want the joke in the way.

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I had the wheel of the Mabel Ruth that spring, after old Pell's chest gave out, and I steered her past the breakwater every morning like a man reading a letter in a language he'd only half learned. Ada knew the tides better than the almanac. She could tell from the colour of the gulls over the mudflats whether the ebb would be kind. So I asked her to stand on the quay each morning and call me the bearing for the Gaunt Rocks, and she said she would guide me so long as I never expected her to come aboard as ballast.

In October the glass dropped fast. The Mabel Ruth was out beyond the Gaunt when the wind backed round, and from the quay I could hear her chain running out through the hawse, that low grumble as the anchor bit somewhere in the lee where I had told her to hold. I didn't see them come in until dusk. By then Ada had already tied the spare line to the bollard, a long loop with the bitter end left slack, the way you do when you expect someone home.

When I finally climbed the slip, wet to the thigh, she didn't ask whether I had been frightened. She pulled the loop tight around my wrist, gave it one hard tug to be sure, and said the Gaunt had shifted two cables since morning, so tomorrow I would have to steer by the bell alone.