Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Small anchor with circle on a forearm
Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo
A small black anchor tattoo sits on the inner forearm of a pale-skinned arm, with a cross at the top and a circle running through the shank. The linework is thin and even, and the design is filled in solid black with no shading. The tattoo is centred in a plain, softly lit frame against a dark background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Mind the hatch, it's been loose since the flood year, and don't lean on the cabin rail or it'll have you in the cut. Right. You want the story of the Mary Ellen's anchor, and I'll tell it the way my father told it to me, sat on this same coaming with his pipe going out every other sentence.
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Her skipper was Tom Pargeter, a man who'd sooner ground a barge than pay a lock-keeper his toll. One November the river came up brown and fast past Newark, and the Mary Ellen dragged her old iron anchor off the bottom. It went down into the silt with a length of chain and the brass ring Tom's wife had strung through the shank so he'd know it from every other anchor on the Trent. Tom stood on the bank with his hands empty and swore at the water until the lock-keeper came out with a lamp.
Three weeks later a boy from the sluice gates came running up the towpath holding something black and cold against his chest. He'd found the anchor snagged in a drowned fence post, the cross of its stock still standing clear of the mud, the ring still turning freely on the shank. Tom didn't thank him. He sat down on the bank and wept like a child, then took the boy to the Cross Keys for a pint of mild he never drank.
Some things only come back when you quit hunting them, lad. Now pass me that lamp, and mind the hatch.
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