Black and white photo of a small solid black anchor tattoo on the outer ankle and heel of a bare foot resting on a wooden floor.

Small anchor tattoo on the ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot and lower leg are shown in side profile, resting on a wooden floor beside a white skirting board. A small, simple black anchor sits on the outer ankle, above the heel, with a thin shaft, ring at the top and curved flukes. The photograph is in greyscale, so the ink reads as solid black against the skin.

Ankle Anchor Foot Ankle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up out of the silt below the slipway on a grey Tuesday, fouled in a fathom of tarred rope, and Dorrie Pinder would not let the lads cart it off to the scrapyard until she had seen the stamp on its shank. Four letters, half eaten by rust. Her grandfather had sailed the collier Thessaly out of that harbour and never come back in her, and everyone in Staithes knew she had gone down with her anchor still on the bow.

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The men argued about the weight. Dorrie argued about the rust. Her cousin in Leeds did metalwork, and he came down on the train with a wire brush and a flask of tea, and for three days the two of them scraped the shank bright in the back yard while the gulls watched from the chimney pots. Under the rust was a second mark, scratched small with a nail by a hand that was not the foundry's: a ring, a thin shaft, and beside them the initials A.P., for Alfie Pinder, eleven years old, signed on as cabin boy and never signed off.

She took the drawing to a tattooist in Scarborough who had worked on ships' crews and did not ask questions. He copied the little anchor exactly, the ring at the top, the curved flukes, and said it was the cleanest line he had pulled all year.

On the harbour wall that evening, Dorrie unfolded the paper and held it against the grey water, then looked down at the real iron resting in the cold shallows. She let the tide have the anchor back. She kept the drawing, folded small enough to fit in a coat pocket, and walked home along the cliff path telling herself the boy had only wanted a keepsake of the sea.