Flash sheet of twenty-four black and white anchor designs, many with crosses, shields, rope and an octopus, in traditional and line-art styles.

Anchor and cross flash sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of twenty-four anchor designs arranged in rows under the heading Anchor Crosses. Designs range from solid black silhouettes and shields to open line drawings with rope, chain, ship's wheels, and one anchor wrapped in an octopus tentacle. All are rendered in black ink on white with no colour, arranged on a plain background.

Traditional Blackwork Anchor Cross Shield Rope Chain Octopus Ship's wheel Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band packs up before the last waltz because the tide has come over the slipway and the fuse box in the Gull Hall has blown for the third time this winter. Somebody passes round a jug of stout and a bag of wet chips, and the whole room drifts toward the windows to watch the lamps on the breakwater. You stay by the cloakroom hatch, where Mrs Pell keeps a brass anchor hung on a nail for luck, and you turn it over in your hand until the metal warms.

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Danny Roper crosses the floor with his cap held in both hands like a man at a funeral. He has been courting you since the summer the ferry went out with the Hadley boys aboard and came back with only two. He says his father wants him on the Maud at dawn, and he would rather be told no to his face than sit in the back pew wondering. The chain on the hatch rattles as he leans on it. You know that sound. Every boat in the harbour has a chain just like it.

You tell him you'll answer after the tide. He nods as though that is an answer and goes out into the wet with his collar up. Mrs Pell lifts the anchor from your palm, weighs it, and says it was her husband's, cast from the hull of a wreck nobody else would claim. Then she hangs it back on its nail.

By dawn the Maud is gone from the pool, her mooring rope lying coiled on the slipway like something let go on purpose. You walk the length of the quay past the bollards and the cranes and find Danny's cap set neatly on the last iron ring, the way a man leaves something he means to come back for. You take the brass anchor from your pocket, tie it to a length of twine, and lower it over the edge into the tide. Then you turn back toward the lit windows of the Gull Hall, where the band is already tuning for the next night.