Small anchor tattoo on a finger
Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo
A small anchor is tattooed in thin, pale ink on the side of a finger. The linework is simple and delicate, with a short vertical shaft, a crossbar and a ring at the top. A hand with purple nail polish holds the finger against a bright blue, sunlit water surface that fills the background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The stamp hung on a nail above the bench at Pritchard's Quay, where my grandfather used it to mark the lobster pots, and nobody had lifted it in the three summers since his hands got too stiff for the work. I took it down on the Tuesday the Lady Ada came in with her hull half scraped and the sun so hard on the slipway that the tide looked like beaten tin.
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Ruth was sixteen and bored of being told to hold things still. She wanted a mark, she said, something of her own. I told her the stamp was for pots, not people, and she said pots were only people with less sense, and pressed the tip of her finger to the inkpad before I could argue. The anchor came out small and pale, because the ink had dried to a grey crust in the tin and I hadn't the heart to throw it away.
We walked out to the end of the wall with the harbour below us, so clear you could count the weed on the mooring chains. She held her hand up against the glare and said the little anchor looked like something you'd find in a rock pool, a thing that belonged to the sea rather than to us.
Grandfather would have clipped my ear for wasting ink. Instead I watched the mark soften with every splash of spray, and by evening it had rubbed down to a ghost on her skin. When the tide turned, the boats swung round on their chains as if nothing in that harbour had ever been fixed in place at all.
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