Black and grey photograph of a small solid black anchor tattoo with a heart-shaped ring on the outer ankle, resting on a patterned bedsheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small anchor tattoo on an ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black anchor with a heart-shaped ring at the top is tattooed on the outer side of an ankle and heel. The lines are bold and even, with the ink fully filled, and there is no shading. The photograph is black and white and shows the tattoo centred in the lower part of the frame against a patterned bedsheet.

Ankle Anchor Heart

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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

Sit closer to the fire and mind the sparks, because this is the part where the old smith rubbed his eyes and swore he would never forge another thing he could not see the sea from. His forge stood at the edge of Harrowfen, where the beeches gave up and the marsh began, and one wet March a bargeman named Tobias Wren came up the path carrying the broken fluke of an anchor wrapped in sacking. The iron had snapped clean from its shank and rusted to the colour of old pennies. Tobias wanted it made whole before his daughter's wedding down on the coast, and he had only three days and a purse that rattled when he walked.

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The smith worked two nights and a day. He could not make the fluke wide enough to hold the way a proper anchor should, so he drew the iron of the eye out thin and beat it round, then pressed the top of the ring into a heart, thinking no sailor would begrudge a bit of softness at the crown of a thing that held on through storms. When Tobias came for it, he held it up to the lantern and laughed until he coughed, saying the harbour men would take one look and call him a fool. He paid anyway, and he paid double.

The smith heard nothing of the wedding for a year. Then a woman with wet hair came through the beeches asking for Edwin Coale, and she carried a child's shoe box with a bent anchor pressed into a scrap of tin. She said the tin had been dropped into the harbour on the wedding day so the bride could never forget where she had come from, and that the little heart had caught on the weed and stayed there. Edwin never learned whether that was true. He only knew the marsh water by the sluice never froze after that, and that when the frost came down hard, the reeds bent toward the spot where something small and heavy was sleeping.