A small black line symbol tattoo on the back of a hand near the wrist, with the hand resting against white jeans and a white bed.

Small black symbol tattoo on a hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a person lying on a white bed in white jeans, with one hand resting near the hip. A small, dark tattoo of a simple symbol sits on the back of the hand near the wrist, and it is shown in black ink only. The white clothing and bedding fill most of the frame, with a grey knitted sleeve at the bottom edge.

Hand Symbol Hand

Find an artist for this

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 Cressida Jane was tied up below Oxford lock when the rain started, and Mam had me up on the cabin roof with a tin of black bitumen and a brush no wider than my thumb. She wanted the small mark repainted on the tiller arm, the one her own father cut with a penknife in 1931, a little anchor with its arms bent like a bent pin. Nobody on the cut could say why an anchor, since a barge never drops one in a river that runs everywhere downhill.

Keep reading

Dad said it was for the estuary, where the old boats went to die and the sea came up to meet them. Mam said it was for keeping still. I thought it was just a mark, the way a farmer's dog gets a notch in its ear, something to know it by.

Then the lock keeper's boy came along the towpath with a bundle of wet letters tied in string, and one was for Grandad Ned, addressed in a hand nobody recognised and posted from Gravesend. Mam opened it sitting on the stern step, read it twice, then folded it into her apron pocket without a word.

I finished the anchor while she was gone. The paint ran a little at the crown, so the mark looked less like a fixed thing and more like something about to be lifted. When she came back she studied it a long while, tapped the tiller twice and said, 'Right, we'll go down with the tide, then.' That was the whole of it. We cast off at first light, and the anchor stayed on the tiller all the way to the sea.