Close photograph of a small solid black anchor tattoo on the side of a person's ribs, above black lace underwear.

Small anchor tattoo on the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small, simple anchor is tattooed on the side of the torso, with a vertical shank, a crossbar and curved flukes in solid black ink. The lines are even and the shape sits well in the centre of the frame, which is taken from an angle as a self-portrait. The skin tone is warm and the background shows a bedroom with shelving and hanging clothes, with black lace underwear across the top of the hips.

Ribs Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter Tomas had been paid in salt and a promise, and the anchor was the only thing the sea had left on the quay at Vrana. It was too heavy for two mules, so he lashed it to the cart with rope his father had made and started up the pass before the snow came down from the high col.

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Nobody in the villages on the far side had seen the sea. They knew it only as a grey rumour in the priest's sermons, a place where men went and did not come back. When the cart reached the first hamlet, children ran beside the wheels and asked what the iron hook was for. Tomas told them it was for holding a ship still when the wind wanted it to go. A woman called Ilse laughed at him and said a ship that could not be held was no ship at all.

At the top of the pass the wind hit hard enough to tip the cart. He stopped and sat on the shank of the anchor, looking down at the valley where the lamps were coming on. His hands were raw. The flukes pointed back toward the coast, toward a sea he could not see, and for the first time he understood what the old quay man had meant by a hook that holds.

He did not carry the anchor further. He dug its flukes into the stones at the summit, and in the spring the villagers found the iron already rusting into the rock, with a little path worn beside it where people stopped to rest and look west.