Small black anchor tattoo on the inside of a person's ankle, worn with white low-top trainers and rolled blue jeans.

Small anchor tattoo on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small black anchor sits on the side of a person's ankle, drawn with a simple, thin outline and an unshaded shank. The tattoo is the only point of detail against bare skin, with white canvas trainers and rolled denim visible around it. The photo is taken from a low angle on a pale wooden floor, with black letterbox bars at the top and bottom of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last ferry has already gone when you reach the slip, so you sit on an iron bollard under the sodium lamps and watch the lights of the far bank bob on the black water. Uncle Teddy used to say the Mersey was a liar, that it would show you a boat drifting when it was really coming in hard against the tide. Tonight it shows you only the Liver Building, smeared and trembling, and gulls asleep on the wet railings.

Keep reading

A man in a yellow fleece comes down the steps with a coil of rope over one shoulder and asks if you're meant to be on the Birkenhead boat. You tell him no, you're waiting for someone who promised to bring the anchor back. He laughs and says anchors don't come back, they get dropped, and tells you about the trawler his father lost off Bar Beach in 1978, how the crew cut the rope rather than be dragged under with it. "Was your uncle a sailor?" he asks. "He was a lot of things," you say.

Teddy never drew with shading. He said shading was for people with time to lie about the light. Years ago he gave you a sheet of paper with a single anchor on it, outlined in one thin unbroken line, and told you a line was honest enough to carry anything. You folded it into your pocket and it has lived there ever since, soft at the creases, the ink bleeding faintly at one corner where the rain got in.

The horn of the late boat sounds out past Egremont. You stand, put your hand in your pocket and feel the paper. Beneath the slip the water has turned and is running out towards the bar, pulling the reflections into long wobbling strokes. You think of the rope cut clean and the ship going down with no anchor at all, and you decide that some things are only worth keeping if you can afford to let them go.

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