Watercolour-style tattoo of a teal anchor wrapped in rope, with two birds and red splashes, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour anchor and birds on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A teal anchor with a rope coiled around its shaft fills the centre of the image, with a red-brown crossbar and ring at the top. Two birds, possibly gulls, sit either side of the anchor among soft red and pink washes. The shading is soft and painterly with splashes of colour, and the tattoo is photographed on a thigh beneath a polka dot skirt.

Thigh Anchor Rope Bird Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls have taken to sitting on the slipway rail again, so I have stopped pretending the paint on the boat will last the winter. Your father's anchor is still in the shed where you left it, the one you swore you would repaint before the spring tides. I did it myself on Tuesday. Teal, like the water in Hollan Sound on a still morning, with the white flecks you liked. I made them with an old toothbrush and I am not proud of the result.

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Mrs Gillies came by with a parcel from the mainland and said the post boat is late again because of the wind out of the north-west. She thinks the gulls are trouble, always screaming over the fish boxes. I told her they are only waiting for us to be careless. Two of them came down on the crossbar this morning, one flushed pink from the sunrise like the inside of a shell, and it stayed long enough that I could count the feathers on its wing.

I found the rope in the drawer with your knots still in it, the bowline and the clove hitch you practised on the kitchen table until I threatened to cut the lot up. I have wound the coil round the shaft the way you showed me, though the knot slipped on the second loop and I expect you will laugh when you see it. Come home and undo it properly.

The boat rode at her mooring all night, and this morning the anchor line was taut as a bell rope. I went down at low water and the paint has held. Tell the men on the Brenda the gulls are keeping watch over the harbour for you. Love, Morag.