Traditional-style colour tattoo of an anchor, red heart, ribbon and stars on the top of a foot, with a matching design drawing shown below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and heart on a foot

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A bare foot with painted red toenails rests on grass, showing a traditional-style anchor tattoo with a red heart behind it, a ribbon banner reading MUM, and small blue and black stars. The lower panel shows the same design as a drawing on a pale background. The anchor is outlined in black with teal and blue shading, and the heart and ribbon are bright red and orange.

Traditional Other Anchor Heart Ribbon Star Foot

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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

You want to know why the old bosun never went ashore without his cap on? It goes back to the Constance Ruth, forty winters ago, when she was still hauling cod off the Dogger Bank. A lad called Tommy Fenn came aboard with a duffel bag and a tin of pencils his mam had pressed on him. He drew on the back of the fish tallies, anchors mostly, because every boy on a trawler wants one somewhere on him.

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On his second trip out the foremast sheared in a gale and the chain came snaking off the bow like a live thing. Tommy was on the windlass. The chain took his boot and dragged him to the rail, and the skipper, Gordon Ash, cut the lashing with the knife he kept for that job. Tommy hung over the black water by one hand until the bosun reached him. Afterwards he sat in the galley with a bruised shin and a bag of frozen peas strapped to his ankle, drawing with the stub of a pencil.

What he drew was an anchor with a red heart pinned behind its shank and a ribbon looping round the stock. Across the ribbon he lettered one word, slow and careful, the way a boy writes when he has only ever seen it in capitals on a birthday card. MUM. He gave the sketch to the cook to pin above the stove, and nobody asked him why. The sea asked questions enough.

Tommy fished until his knees gave out, and the drawing stayed above that stove for thirty years, the blue of it gone soft with steam. When they finally stripped the galley, the paper turned up folded inside a cookery book, the ribbon still bright. Ernie kept it in his oilskin pocket for the rest of his days. When anyone asked about the word on the ribbon, he said it was the one thing aboard that never needed a bearing.