Fine line black anchor tattoo on the side of a finger on a light-skinned hand against a dark background.

Small anchor tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A tiny anchor is tattooed on the side of a finger, with its shank and ring drawn in thin, dark black linework. The ink is crisp and sits close to the finger joint, with no shading or added colour. The photo is taken close up against a dark background, so the small design stands out clearly.

Fine line Hand Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice on Harrow Mere had not cracked in forty winters, so when the carrier's sledge came up the road with its runners singing, Mother Dunne said nothing about the anchor until the snow was past the sills. It hung over the taproom hearth on a loop of tarred rope, black iron worn bright at the flukes, and it had come up out of the mere the year before her grandmother was born, from a boat that went under the bridge with all hands and never gave a reason.

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The stranger who came in on the ninth day of the snow had frost in his eyebrows and a wooden box under one arm. He asked for a bed, paid in silver clipped at the edges, and went up without eating. Before the bell struck two his boots were gone from beside the door, and the box was gone too, and the inn dog would not stop whining at the foot of the stairs until Nell took it by the scruff and followed the prints out across the yard.

The prints ran to the reed-hole where the ice was thin and grey. He was standing at its edge with the box open at his feet, and inside it lay a little iron anchor, no longer than a finger, that he meant to drop through the ice to call his father home. The ice groaned under him. Nell knotted the hearth rope round her waist, lay flat on the snow, and crawled out until she could reach his coat, and he held on to the rope with both hands while she hauled.

In the morning he sat by the fire and said the anchor had been his father's, that it had come off the drowned boat and been stolen from his father's chest. Mother Dunne took it down, weighed it in her palm, and hung it back on its hook. He did not ask for it again. When the thaw came, Nell found a small anchor drawn in the frost on the inside of the window, one fine line for the shank and a ring at the top, and she left it there until the sun took it.