Three white chalk-style line drawings of anchors on a black chalkboard background, one with a cross on top and one with the letters G and V, shown as tattoo flash designs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three line-drawn anchor designs

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows three anchor designs drawn in white thin lines on a black chalkboard texture. The left anchor has a looped, script-like form on its shaft with a cross bar at the top, the middle anchor has a diagonal bar across its shaft and the letters G and V beside it, and the right anchor has a cross and a heart-shaped curve above its arrowed flukes. The designs are evenly spaced and centred, with no body or skin visible.

Fine line Anchor Cross Letter Arrow Heart Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea took the last of the north wall the winter Old Mab's son went out after the herring and did not come back. Nobody in Scarrow Bay blamed the wall. They blamed the tide, then the lord who had let the mortar rot, and once the lord had gone south to die in a softer bed, they blamed nobody and simply stopped looking at the ruin.

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Mab did not stop. Each morning she walked the lower courtyard with a lump of chalk and drew on the flagstones whatever she could remember of him. A looped line for the knot he tied. A bar across the shaft for the oar he had snapped on the rocks at Thrum. Two letters, G and V, for the boat he sailed in, the Good Verity, though the paint had long since gone from her hull. The rain took the drawings by noon every day, and every day she drew them again.

In March a mason's girl called Hanna came up from the village with a bag of tools over her shoulder and asked why the old woman was wasting chalk on stone that would not keep it. Mab told her. Hanna listened, then knelt and cut three anchors into the gatehouse lintel, the looped one, the barred one with the letters beside it, and a plain one with a cross above a heart. She charged Mab nothing. "The sea reads what's cut," she said. "It's slower than chalk."

The next winter the fog came down thick on the bay. Boats out past the headland could not see the cliff, but the men who had been fishing that water all their lives knew to look for the gatehouse, and when they saw the carved anchors through the murk they turned for home. Mab sat on the wall with her hands in her lap and counted the lights coming in, one, then another, then the last, which was late, and which she waited for until the bell rang for dawn.