Black and grey anchor and feather tattoo with shaded realistic detail on the inner upper arm of a person wearing a white top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and feather on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of an anchor with a feather wrapped diagonally across its shank, with the feather's barbs and the anchor's flukes rendered in soft grey shading. The linework is clean and the shading gives the anchor and feather a sense of depth against the skin. The tattoo sits on the inner upper arm, with a white top and a braided brown belt visible at the edge of the frame.

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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

Now sit down, because the wind is backing north and I'll not be shouted over by it. You want the one about Tam Corrie and the gull? Everyone on Inchmurrin knows the bones of it, but they tell it wrong, so listen.

Keep reading

Tam had his dead father's anchor, rusted to the colour of dried tea, and every spring he dragged it up from the slipway to scrape it back to iron. His mother said the sea had taken enough men from that house without a boy hanging on to its chain. Tam hung on anyway. One morning a grey gull came down on the stern of the Morag Jean and would not be shooed. When it lifted off, it left a single feather snagged on the anchor's shank, where the iron lay coiled in the bow.

That winter the sea came in hard. The Morag Jean dragged her moorings in the Sound, and Tam went out alone to the bow in the black water with the anchor line in his hands. He said afterwards that the feather lifted on the wind as if it was trying to get back to something, and he felt the flukes bite into the sand and hold. Then the boat stopped. They found him on the shingle at dawn, coughing up seawater, with the feather still wound round the iron and the Morag Jean sitting quiet at her mooring.

So when you see a lad with an anchor on his arm and a feather across it, don't ask whether he's a sailor or a dreamer. Ask him what he's holding on to. Right, the kettle's on. Mind the step.

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