Shaded grey anchor with a looping rope and pink blossoms, a botanical style tattoo on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and blossoms on the side ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A grey, shaded anchor wrapped in a looping rope curls diagonally across the skin, with its shank and flukes rendered in soft greys and highlights. Clusters of pink and purple five-petalled blossoms are scattered over and around the anchor, adding colour to the otherwise monochrome shading. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso, with the rope tail finishing in a curl at the lower right.

Botanical Ribs Anchor Rope Blossom Flower Swirl

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 school hall still smells of floor polish and weak tea, and the name badges on the trestle table are written in a hand you half remember. You find your own, Kit Morrow, in capitals that have run a little in the damp. Someone behind you says your old name, the one from the sailing club, and for a second you are fourteen again with a rope burning your palms.

Keep reading

That summer Mr Hollis kept a coil of old mooring line in the stockroom and let the club practise knots on the yard railings. You were good at bowlines. Adele Parr was better at everything that didn't involve rope. She pressed lilac from the churchyard wall between the pages of her atlas and sketched an anchor in the margins, its shank wrapped in a line that never quite finished. She said the rope was the bit that kept you tied to the place you came from. You told her that was rubbish. You both promised to sail somewhere the line ran out.

Adele's badge is on the table too, unclaimed. Mrs Hollis, who runs the urn, tells you Adele married a man with a crabbing boat out of Bridlington, and that the boat went down off Flamborough the winter after. You take the atlas out of your carrier bag. The lilac is brown now, flat as card, and beneath it the pencilled anchor has been drawn over so many times the paper has nearly worn through.

You walk down to the harbour before the buffet is opened. The wind lifts the petals one at a time and sets them on the grey water, pink and purple among the gulls' feathers and the diesel sheen. You stand there until the rope in your memory stops pulling, then you climb back up the hill to find a chair.