“No one kisses like you,” he muttered.
“Many kiss like you,” she responded, smiling.
He thought to himself: she’s smiling so that I shall know she’s jesting and that she has never kissed anyone else.
While he caressed her two small hands between his, he noticed that she was looking at his left hand.
“You are looking at the anchor,” he said. “It’s true that it is not handsome. And it won’t come off.”
She took his hand and surveyed inquisitively the blue dots that formed an anchor. But she said nothing.
“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.