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“It was in Hamburg that was done,” he said. “I was a ship’s boy on a vessel. We had come ashore and gone into a tavern by the harbor. I remember it all so well: the fog, the many masts in the harbor, and the smell of the grease. My comrades were tattooed, on the hands, arms and body, and they thought I ought to have myself tattooed also. I couldn’t refuse, or they would have thought I was afraid of the pain, for it hurt a great deal. But I thought, too, it was stylish; I was hardly fourteen, you know.”

“Are you tattooed on the body as well?” she asked.

Smilingly and somewhat unwillingly he answered, “Yes, I have on the breast a ship and a bird, which is supposed to be an eagle, though it’s more like a rooster.”

She looked long into his eyes, then slowly raised his hand to her lips and kissed the blue anchor.

Years passed, and one day Richard Fant said to his wife as they were dressing to go out to dinner, “Do you know, I think the blue anchor is beginning to fade. Perhaps it’s on the way to vanish entirely.”