Black and grey shaded anchor tattoo with a chain wrapped around the shank, on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and chain on the top of a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded anchor with a chain looped around its shank is tattooed across the top of a foot, with a small pair of curved shapes beside the lower part of the anchor. The work uses black ink and grey tones to give the anchor a rounded, three-dimensional look with highlights and soft shadows. The design is centred on the foot against a dark, glossy surface.

Other Anchor Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pat Harrigan had forged the chain himself, link by link, in the smithy behind the Co-op at Haswell Row, and he was not about to let the colliery office have it back for a cage that had already failed one inspection. The new winding rope was due on Thursday. Jim Coulson stood in the doorway with his cap in his hands and said the manager wanted the old lengths cut up for scrap, and Pat told him the manager could come and cut them himself.

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Nobody in the row had ever seen the sea except on the postcards pinned up in the Miners' Welfare. Pat's brother Dan had gone to Hartlepool on the coal boats as a lad and came back with an anchor inked on the top of his foot and a way of standing that made the older men uneasy. That anchor was why Pat had learned to shape iron in the first place. Dan would sit on the back step with a biro drawing and make Pat say the names of the parts: stock, crown, fluke, shank. Pat had never known what a fluke was for until he saw the word stamped on a plate at the dock.

The explosion in March took eleven men and left the cage hanging a fathom above the shaft for two hours. Afterwards the lads said the chain had held only because somebody had over-built it. Pat did not argue. He took the old pattern down from his shelf, the one with the small looped ring at the top, and began again while the forge was still warm.

When the new cage came up on Thursday, Dan was at the head gear with one hand on the rail. He looked at the chain for a long time, then turned the ring with his thumb and checked the welds twice, the way Pat had shown him. He nodded once and went to fetch the men.