Small black fine line anchor tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist, with a hand and knitted sleeve in the frame.

Small anchor tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black anchor sits on the inner forearm close to the wrist, drawn with a simple, even outline and a ring at the top. The linework is clean and the anchor is filled with solid black ink rather than shading. The pale skin, brown knitted sleeve and the hand at the bottom of the frame make up a soft, muted composition.

Fine line Forearm Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Hold the line steady, Nell, or she'll swing us into the lock gate again." Old Tom Bransby said it without looking up from the tiller, the way he had said it every April since the canal was dug. The water was brown and sluggish under Ashby Wharf bridge, and the barge Mercy groaned against her rope as though she had opinions about the morning.

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Nell had come up from the Thames at sixteen with a seaman's knot she could tie blindfold and no notion of what a canal wanted from a person. Tom taught her the rest. Canals, he said, were rivers that had been talked into behaving. You learned their moods or they drowned you in a foot of water.

The anchor came up on a Tuesday. Nobody had dropped it there. It had lain in the mud beside the wharf since before the railway, a great iron thing with a ring at its crown, black with silt. Nell hauled it out with the winch and the whole village came down to stare. The vicar called it a sign. The publican offered a pint for it. Tom only ran his thumb along the shank and said that a thing that old had clearly been waiting for someone to notice it was a boat.

They hung it on the Mercy's cabin wall where the sun caught it each morning, and Nell polished the ring until it shone like a coin. On still evenings, when the lock was quiet and the herons stood motionless in the reeds, she would lean out over the water and listen for gulls, and sometimes, faintly, she thought she heard them.