Fine line black anchor tattoo on the side of a finger, shown on a hand making an OK gesture against a pale tiled wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small anchor on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small black anchor sits on the side of one finger of a hand that is curled into an OK shape. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black. The pale background and soft lighting keep the focus on the small tattoo and the nails, which are painted in a muted nude shade with one nail in green.

Fine line Hand 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

The rope gave out on the bend of Scarrow Hill, and the anchor of the Mary Ellen slid back down the cobbles with a sound like a dropped bell. Agnes Pollard caught the handle before it reached the gutter, then stood with her boots planted and her breath smoking, nobody else in Porthkennack close enough to help. Nobody wanted to touch it. Not since the trawler went down off the Sound with four men aboard, and the anchor came up in a fisherman's net a week later, still wearing its weed like a beard.

Keep reading

Her brother-in-law Tom had told her it was cursed, which was why she had volunteered to haul it to the chapel yard in the first place. She had no patience for curses. She had patience for knots, and she retied the hitch with the tarred twine from her coat pocket, the way her father had taught her on the quay: a round turn and two half hitches, pulled tight until the load stopped swaying.

At the top, with the harbour spread below and the lighthouse beginning its slow count, she turned the anchor over to scrape the weed from the shank. Someone had cut initials into the iron, shallow and uneven. J.P. Her father's letters. For thirty years he had sworn the Mary Ellen was sold to a Falmouth man before the storm, and that her anchor had gone with the sale.

Tom came puffing up the path and found her kneeling in the wet. He didn't apologise. He took the twine from her hand and tied the final knot himself, and for a long while neither of them spoke. Then Agnes pressed her thumb into the cut letters and felt how deep they went, deeper than a man would carve for a thing he meant to forget.