Black and grey anchor tattoo with light shading on the side of a ribcage, beside a black bikini strap and grey top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small anchor tattoo on ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small anchor tattoo sits on the side of the ribs, drawn with a black outline and grey shading on the shank and flukes. The body is shown from the side, with a black bikini strap and a grey sleeveless top in the frame, and a pink and white bracelet on the wrist. The angled close crop and soft natural light keep the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Ribs Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The relief boat should have bumped the landing stage by now, and instead you stand at the gallery rail counting the sweeps of the lamp, one every ten seconds, the way old Mr Pengelly taught you when he still had the knees for the stairs. Below, the sea has turned the colour of wet slate. Nothing moves on it but the gulls, and they keep sliding off the wind as if they have also been told to wait.

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On the third night you go down to the store room for spare paraffin and find the chain locker standing open. Hanging from the hook by the door is an old fluke anchor, too heavy to shift, its shank scraped bright where a hundred hands have steadied themselves on it. Someone once scratched a name into the iron beneath the ring: MARGARET, and a year you can no longer quite read. You have walked past it a thousand times. Tonight you set the lamp on the flagstones and run your thumb along the flukes, which are still sharp enough to make you think of holding on.

At first light a small blue hull noses round the point, low in the water, with a boy at the tiller and a man in oilskins bailing with a bucket. The boy is called Kit, and he apologises before he is even over the rail. They had to lie in the lee of the reef all night, he says, and he could not bring himself to drop a hook in water that deep without someone at the wheel to tell him how.

You take the crate of tinned peaches and the post from him and hand him a mug of tea. Then you walk him down to the store room and show him the anchor, and while he turns it in his hands you tell him the name on it belonged to a woman who once rowed out to a stranded ship, and that she never once asked for thanks.