Small black anchor tattoo with a heart-shaped ring on the inner wrist, shown in fine line style on a person wearing a brown knit cardigan.

Small black anchor on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black anchor sits on the inner wrist, with its shank, crossbar and flukes drawn in a clean, even line. The top ring of the anchor appears to be shaped like a small heart. The tattoo is shown in black ink against pale skin, with the rest of the frame showing a brown knit sleeve, a white top and a dark trouser leg in soft natural light.

Fine line Forearm Anchor Heart

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry out of Holyhead was half empty when Maggie found the envelope in her coat, still sealed, still smelling of the tallow Dad used on the rigging before he went to the bottom of the Irish Sea in 1962. She read it on the open deck with the wind taking the pages sideways. It was not a letter to her. It was to a woman named Nessa Doyle who kept the chandlery on Beaumaris Quay, and it said only: the anchor holds if the heart is kept on the rope, and I am keeping it there for you.

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Maggie went looking for Nessa that afternoon, past the bait sheds and the mooring posts painted white and blue, past the pub where the fishermen still argued about tides. The chandlery had a shutter down and a cat asleep on the step. A girl of about twelve came out of the back with a bucket of brass shackles and asked who wanted to know. Maggie held up the envelope. The girl shrugged and said her gran had died in March, and the shop had been shut since, and nobody had ever come asking.

But the girl took her round the side, to a ledger nailed inside the stable door. Under a column of tallies, in fading ink, were rows of small drawings: a plain anchor, then an anchor with a little heart at its ring. Beside every heart was a date. The last one was the week Maggie's father had sailed. Maggie laughed until she cried, because she had been carrying the letter for sixty years without knowing it was the reply.