Two small solid black anchor tattoos, one on each of two ankles, resting on a patterned rug.

Small anchor tattoos on two ankles

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet rest on a patterned rug, with a small black anchor tattoo on the outer side of each ankle. The anchors are simple solid outlines with little shading, and the design is a single dark ink with no colour. The close framing places both tattoos near the centre of the image, with the rug's leopard print and geometric pattern filling the background.

Ankle Anchor Ankle Feet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The motel carpet here is leopard print, which the man at reception assured me is the height of Nevada fashion, and I have spent two nights lying on it with a cold cup of tea, trying to decide whether you were right to talk me into the anchors. You said a thing that holds still while everything else drifts off. I said anchors were for sailors and we were two women who had never seen the sea properly. You bought the ink the next morning and held my hand through it anyway.

The car gave up outside a place called Dry Lake, forty miles past the last working pump. A mechanic called Ruiz drove out in a truck with a dog asleep on the passenger seat. He told me the road cuts through an old seabed, and that if I kicked the gravel by the verge I would turn up shells as thin as fingernails. I did. I have been kicking gravel all afternoon, and every time I find one I think of you pressing your thumb on my ankle to see if the lines were straight.

Ruiz says the part will come Thursday, if the driver remembers to bring it. Until then I am sitting on the step outside room nine with the door propped open so the fan can keep the carpet from smelling of anything worse than dust. The light goes orange across the flats and the wind moves the power lines like a long bow across strings.

I am posting you the best shell, wrapped in a sock so it does not break. Put it on the windowsill where the morning comes in. When you see it, you will know I am still moving, only slowly, the way things do when they have something to come back to.

Love, Bea