Small solid black anchor tattoo on the inner wrist of a raised fist, against a blurred background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small anchor on inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black anchor sits on the inner wrist of a hand held up in a loose fist, with fingertips visible at the top of the frame. The anchor is a simple silhouette with a ring at the top, a vertical shank, a crossbar and curved flukes, filled in with black ink and no shading. The skin is light and the background is softly out of focus, so the tattoo is the clear point of the composition.

Forearm Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Mercy Ann has fouled her anchor on the wreck off Start Point again, and Skipper Pascoe wants someone small enough to lean over the bow and clear the chain. Nobody else in Brixham will go over that side in February, so it is you, in your father's oilskins that stop short at the ankle, holding a boathook while the swell lifts the stem and drops it away from the rocks.

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The anchor comes up in a shriek of links, but it is not the one you expected. It is older, its ring worn smooth, its flukes furred with weed and a crab's empty claw caught in the crossbar. Pascoe leans out, studies it for a long time, and says it belonged to the Sparrow, lost in '61 with all four men aboard. He says nothing more. He hauls it onto the deck and props it against the wheelhouse like a guest who has arrived uninvited.

On the run home you sit on the hatch with your back to the wind and scrape the crust from the shank with a penknife. Beneath the rust there is a stamped name, half gone, and a pair of initials you can still read: E.T. Pascoe takes the wheel and tells you to keep hold of the rope until you are ashore, because a ring is what holds a boat when the tide turns against her.

Next morning, before the gulls are up, you wheel the anchor up Fore Street on a barrow to the chapel where the names are cut into slate. You set it down in the wet grass beneath the Sparrow's panel and watch the first light find the flukes.