Colour Traditional-style tattoo of a grey anchor with a green and blue feather wrapped around it, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and feather on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A shaded grey anchor with a bold black outline runs diagonally across the leg, with a feather wrapped around its shank. The feather is rendered in green and blue with lighter highlights along its barbs and quill. The background is a grey carpet, and the skin is shown in soft, even lighting.

Traditional Calf Anchor Feather

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 anchor came up in Mr Penhallow's trawl on the ebb, black with weed, and he tipped it onto the quay like a catch nobody wanted. My brother Tomas was the one who saw the feather. It was caught round the shank, a long wing feather, green at the tip and blue where the light caught it, and it had not rotted though the iron had lain under the Sound for thirty years.

Keep reading

Nobody in Porthgwidden would say whose boat it had been. The Marigold went down off the Gannet Rocks in the winter of seventy-one, and the owner's widow had moved to Plymouth before the spring. Tomas wanted to hang the thing above the chip shop door. Mam said it was bad luck to bring up what the sea had kept, so she took it up the hill herself in the back of the van.

I found the widow on the cliff path the next morning, sitting on the stile with the anchor across her knees, scraping rust from the shank with a butter knife. She said the feather was from a kingfisher. Her husband had bought a bird book in Newlyn and read it aloud every evening until he could name every bird on the estuary. She had tied it on herself the week before he sailed, so the anchor would keep him near, and she had never once thought to check it was still there.

We left the anchor with her. When I looked back from the bend, the feather was lifting off the iron in the wind, green against the grey water, and none of us went after it.