Two black ink thigh tattoos on a woman in denim shorts: a ship's wheel with script reading Be the one to guide me, and an anchor with script reading but never hold me down.

Ship's wheel and anchor thigh tattoos

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two black ink tattoos on the outer thighs of a person wearing dark denim shorts and a striped top. On the left thigh, a ship's wheel is drawn with bold outlines and spoke detail, with cursive lettering curving around it. On the right thigh, an anchor with a rope detail is accompanied by cursive script above and beside it, and the lettering is set against a dark, softly lit background.

Lettering Thigh Ship's wheel Anchor Script Rope Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairi kept the harbour book at Skerrow pier because her hands were too cold for knots. Every night she wrote down the names of the men who had gone out past the skerries, and every night the list of those who came back was a little shorter than the list of those who went. The herring had failed for three winters running, and the young men had begun to talk about the mainland towns where a boat was not needed.

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A ship's wheel hung on the wall of the net loft, salvaged from the Morag Lee when she was broken up. Its spokes were worn pale where a hundred hands had turned it. Beside it, on a nail, hung her anchor. Mairi asked old Ewan the cooper what good a wheel was if it could only point a boat at the rocks, and he said the wheel was for finding the way home, but the anchor was for stopping a boat from being pulled out to sea when the wind took her. "Guide them," he said, "but don't hold them. A held boat drowns at her moorings."

In April a squall came down off the Minch faster than anyone had expected. Calum Brodie, nineteen and too proud to turn back, was still beyond the skerries with his brother's boat and no crew but a dog. Mairi stood on the pier in the rain and hauled the Gannet's spare anchor line from the store herself, then rowed out with it to the crooked rock where the water ran smooth. She made it fast and let the rope run, slow and steady, so the boat could ride the swell rather than fight it.

At dawn the Gannet came round the point with her sail torn to ribbons and the dog barking from the bow. Mairi did not sleep. She opened the harbour book and wrote Calum's name in ink, not pencil, and beside it she wrote that he had come home.