Close photo of a small black anchor tattoo on the upper arm of a person sunbathing on a beach in a red and white striped bikini top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small anchor tattoo on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A person lies on a beach with their head cropped out of frame, showing a small black anchor tattoo on the upper arm near the shoulder. The outline is simple and sits on sun-tanned skin against a bright blue sky and sea. The striped red and white bikini top and a blue bikini bottom fill the right side of the composition.

Upper arm Anchor Beach Bikini

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Fenella Oakes had the anchor done the summer after our leavers' dance, when the rest of us were still pretending we had opinions about A-levels. She turned up at the reunion in the back room of the Ship Inn in Weymouth, the one with the carpet that sticks to your shoes, and the first thing she asked me was whether I still had the spare key to the Mermaid, the dinghy we'd kept in her uncle's boathouse under the harbour wall.

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We had planned to sail her to Brittany before the end of August. We got as far as the buoy off Chesil and then the wind turned, and Fenella, who had read one book about tides, insisted we were fine. We were not fine. We came back in with the sail torn and a red and white stripe of canvas flapping like bunting, and her uncle laughed so hard he had to sit down on an upturned crate. Nobody mentioned Brittany again.

By ten o'clock the room had gone loud and the DJ had given up on the playlist. Fenella stood by the window with a glass of something pink and tapped the glass against her arm, where the small black anchor sat just under the shoulder. I asked if it was for the sailing. She said it was for the day we didn't drown, which she claimed was the only one worth marking.

I took the key out of my coat pocket and put it on the sill between us. Neither of us picked it up. Outside, the harbour lights were coming on one by one, and the boathouse was still there, still locked, still waiting for somebody daft enough to try again.