Black and grey traditional style tattoo of an anchor wrapped in rope with a heart on the shank and the words Have Heart beneath, on the upper back.

Anchor and heart with Have Heart script

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an anchor with a heart at the top of its shank and rope wound around the stock, with bold outlines and soft grey shading on the flukes and crown. The words Have Heart sit in a black hand-lettered script beneath the anchor. The photograph is taken close up in black and white, with hair falling across the upper part of the image.

Traditional Back Anchor Rope Heart Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit where the light comes through the bean poles, because I'll not tell this twice and the bees have their own opinions about interruptions. That anchor lying on its side in the rhubarb bed came off the Mary Ellen the winter her skipper lost his nerve somewhere past Flamborough Head. It took three men and a borrowed carthorse to haul it up the cliff path.

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Skipper Tom Ansell never went back to sea, but he would not let the iron go to the scrapyard either. He sat in this very garden all that summer with a ball of tarred hemp on his knee, winding rope round the stock knot by knot, the way his mother had wound wool for the church bazaar. At the top of the shank he fixed a heart he'd beaten out of a tobacco tin, so the old thing would have something soft to hold it up. The village called him soft in the head. He let them.

Then came the spring the ground froze hard as a bread board. Tom went out with a pot of whitewash and a hand that shook worse than it used to, and he lettered two words along the shed wall, bold as a lamp on a headland: Have Heart. Nobody asked him what he meant by it, and he never said.

By June a foxglove had pushed up through the flukes, purple as a bruise, and every bumblebee in the parish came to inspect it. Tom would have liked that. He'd have said nothing, of course, only rolled another length of rope.