Black and grey photo of a small solid anchor tattoo on the back of an ankle, resting on a patterned bedsheet.

Small anchor on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black anchor sits on the back of a bare ankle and heel, with a plain shank, crossbar and curved flukes. The ink is uniform and dark with clean edges, and the anchor is shown against smooth, pale skin. The photograph is black and white, with a small floral print on the bedsheet filling the background.

Ankle Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up in Harker's net on a Tuesday, and nobody in South Shields wanted to say whose it was, because the boat it belonged to had gone out in March and never come back. Old Alf Harker sat on the quay with it between his boots, scraping weed from the flukes with the knife he had used on mackerel for forty years, and he would not let anyone help him lift it.

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His granddaughter Nell watched from the harbour wall. She had a pencil stub and the back of a chandler's invoice, and she drew the thing the way her father had taught her to draw rigging: shank first, then the crossbar, then the curled arms that would catch on the bottom if you let them. "It's too heavy to carry," Alf said when he saw the drawing. "That's why they make them small enough to hold."

She took the sketch to the parlour on Fowler Street that afternoon. The man there had a brass lamp clipped to his chair and a jar of cloves on the sill, and he looked at the paper for a long time before he said he had never done an anchor with the crossbar so square. Nell told him the real one had been square. He inked it that way, small and black, and the needle hummed on until the light outside had gone grey over the river.

Alf died before the autumn gales. At the wake Nell dragged the big iron into the middle of the hall and set it beside the urn, and the men stood round it saying the boat's name the way you'd say a grace. Nobody had the heart to put it back in the water. The little one stayed where it was, and it held.