Black line drawing of an anchor with a looping rope forming an infinity shape and script lettering, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Anchor and infinity rope design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of an anchor with a rope that loops into an infinity shape across the top, with a script word above and the word life in cursive on the left. A small heart is cut out of the anchor's base, and the linework is smooth with thicker strokes on the rope and anchor arms. The image is a plain black design on a white background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Anchor Infinity Rope Heart Script Life

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bow rope had gone stiff with canal slime by the time Dougie Parr hauled the Patience into the lock at Stoke Wharf, and he wouldn't let me touch it until he'd coiled it twice, the way his father taught him. I stood on the lock side with my hands in my coat, watching the water climb the brick as if it had nowhere better to be.

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The anchor lived in the stern locker under a sack of coal dust, a squat old thing with a hole worn through one fluke where somebody had once threaded a shackle. Dougie said it had never touched the bottom of anything deeper than a towpath ditch, but he polished it every spring regardless. That spring he scratched a small heart into the base of the shank with a nail file and a steady hand. Nobody asked him why. Nobody needed to.

The rope he chose was good manila, the kind that holds its shape. He ran it from the cleat up over the cabin roof and back down, making a loop, then a crossing, then another loop, until the line lay on its side like a figure eight. Above the top loop he wrote a word in his careful hand, and beside the long curl on the left he asked me to write life, so it trailed off the edge where the rope bent back on itself.

When the gates groaned open he untied the bow and the rope slid through his fingers, still looping, and I thought how a thing that goes round and round can still be getting somewhere. He stood at the tiller with the anchor hanging unused at his hip, the little heart catching the light off the water, and we slid out onto the cut without a word.