Small solid black anchor tattoo behind a person's ear, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small anchor behind the ear

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close black and white photograph of a person's ear and the side of their head, with their hair pulled back. A small solid black anchor sits on the skin just behind the ear, with a simple shank, crossbar and curved base. The composition is tight and uncluttered, with the tattoo as the clear focal point against the pale skin.

Fine line Other Anchor Ear Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's slick from the fish boxes. There, you're in. Now sit where the stove keeps off the draught and I'll tell you about Tobias Wren, who swore he'd never set foot on a boat again after the winter the Margaret went onto the Skerries with her hold full of lamp oil. He came ashore at Lowestoft with one good boot and a pocketful of wet matches, and he took a room above the chandler's on Bell Lane because the landlady didn't ask questions about the tide tables he kept under his pillow.

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He worked the lamps at the pier end for eleven years. Nights, mostly. The fog came in off the North Sea like something alive, and the only thing that saw a boat home was a light that didn't flicker. He kept his hands busy with brass and rag, and he kept his mouth shut about the Margaret, all except once, to a girl named Ada Pim who sold cockles from a barrow and never once looked at him like he was a ghost.

What he did for her, I'll tell you plain. The week before she married the ferryman's son, Tobias walked her to the corner of the quay at two in the morning, took a pin from the lamp-keeper's tin, and pressed a small iron anchor into the skin behind her ear, the way his own father had done for him. It bled a little. She laughed and said it would keep her from drifting. He said it was for the other thing, the holding, and she knew what he meant.

They say she wore it sixty years and never once let it fade. And when they buried her, the ferryman's grandchildren found the lamp still lit at the end of the pier, though nobody had climbed up to trim it since Tobias went down with his boots on. Off you go now. Mind the step.