Small black fine line anchor tattoo on the inner wrist, beside a jewelled bracelet, in a black and grey photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small anchor tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black anchor sits on the inner wrist, with a simple shaft, crossbar, ring at the top and curved flukes. The linework is fine and even, and the ink is solid black with soft grey shading in the skin around it. A jewelled bracelet with oval stones and shell-like settings sits below the tattoo, and the photograph is in black and white with the background falling into shadow.

Fine line Forearm Anchor Bracelet Jewellery Wrist

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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

Right, sit down, you'll not hear the end of it standing. Thirty-one years I sailed the Lowestoft run and the long haul round the Cape, and the best thing I ever carried was a bracelet that never once left a sailor's hands until it reached the right wrist. Old Harry Quayle bought it in Port Elizabeth off a Dutch bosun who owed him six pounds. Oval stones, shell settings, the lot, handled so often the silver had gone soft as butter.

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Harry was never one for jewellery. He said a man who wears gold on a ship is asking the sea for it back. So when we raised the Scillies in March with the hold half-rotten and the mate drinking the rum ration early, Harry sat on the hatch cover with a sewing needle and a bottle of Indian ink and made a mark on his own wrist. Nobody watched him do it. A small anchor, shaft and crossbar, flukes curled like a question. The needle went in and out for the best part of an hour and he never once flinched.

Then he took the bracelet off the cabin hook, buckled it over the anchor so the stones sat just below it, and said, "Now something's holding on to me that I actually chose." He went ashore at Bristol and I never saw him again. The bracelet came to me in his sea chest with a note pinned to the clasp: keep the stones bright, the anchor will do the rest.