Close photograph of a small black fine line anchor tattoo on the inner wrist, with a gold bracelet and plaid sleeve cuff nearby.

Small anchor tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tiny anchor with a ring at the top and a straight shank sits on the inner wrist, drawn in thin dark linework with no shading. The ink is black and has softened slightly into the skin. The photo is taken from a slight angle with a gold chain bracelet and a white checked cuff in the frame, and the tattoo sits near the centre-top of the image.

Fine line Forearm Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis had the biro clamped in his teeth when Mr Pargeter came up the slipway shouting about the tide, and he didn't take it out to answer. He was bent over the ferry timetable on the bench outside the chandlery, drawing an anchor in the margin with the care of a man threading a needle. Every line was thin and dark. He never shaded anything in his life. He said shading was for people who had nothing better to say.

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"What's that for?" I asked, when Pargeter had gone off muttering toward the fish market.

"Wrist," he said, and tapped the soft inside of his own with the pen cap. "Where I can see it when I'm gripping a line in a blow." He had lost the Mary Ellen off Bradwell in the gale of seventy-nine, when the warp parted and the anchor went down with her. He had come ashore on a fender and a prayer, and he had not forgiven the sea for the anchor, only for himself.

"Doesn't seem fair on the anchor," I said. "It did its job."

"That's the point," he said. "Held on the whole night. Nobody remembers that bit." He blew across the ink, though it was only biro, and folded the timetable so the little drawing faced out. Years later, when the chandlery had changed hands twice and the Mary Ellen was only a name painted on a bench, I saw his wrist resting on the rail of the quay. The anchor had softened at the edges, the way a thing does when it has been gripped for a long time, but the shank was still straight.