Small black fine line anchor tattoo on the wrist and lower forearm, beside a hand with white French manicure nails.

Small anchor tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black anchor sits on the wrist, drawn with thin, even linework and a looped ring at the top. The ink is solid black with no shading, and the tattoo is set against bare skin on a dark background. The composition is a close side view of the hand held in a loose fist, with the tattoo the clear focal point.

Fine line Forearm Anchor

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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

My grandfather never went to sea, though the whole of Hollin Row swore he had, because he came home from the Brackley pit with an anchor on his wrist and wouldn't say where he got it. Ask him and he'd only turn the hand over and tap the little ring at the top, the way you'd check a watch. The men said a fitter had done it with a sail needle and a bottle of cold tea. The women said it was the coal dust that did it, that the seam had been trying to pull him somewhere for years and the anchor was his way of holding on.

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He worked the low galleries for thirty-one years after that, and every shift he'd come up the cage with his fist closed, the way a man does when he's carrying something he doesn't want spilled. Once a roof fall shut the east road for three days. They sent the rescue party in with lamps and rope, and my grandfather went down with them, though he was past the age for it. When they finally broke through he was the first one through the gap, shoving his arm into the dark, and the lad they'd lost came out gripping his wrist, the ink black against his white knuckles.

The lad swore the anchor had hooked him. My grandfather said that was nonsense and went back to his tea. But he never took the wrist back from the lad's grip that night, not until the lamps were lit and the last of them was above ground.

When they buried him, the new vicar read out the list of his shifts and the men stood in the rain with their caps in their hands. I remember the lad stepping forward to lay a hand on the lid, and there on his own wrist, faint and blue-black, was a small anchor with a ring at the top.