Forearm tattoo of a rope-edged infinity symbol with an anchor and the script words I refuse to sink, mostly black ink with a red accent.

Anchor and infinity rope with script on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A rope-edged infinity symbol wraps around a black outlined anchor, with a red arc sweeping behind the upper loop. Below, the words I refuse to sink are written in a flowing black script with a fine, slightly uneven line. The ink is mostly black and grey with a small amount of red, and the design sits centrally on the skin against a plain background.

Lettering Forearm Anchor Infinity Rope Script text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been falling since Tuesday, and by Thursday the Moor road had gone under so completely that the Fleece was ours whether we liked it or not. Uncle Walt stood on a chair to rehang the old barge anchor above the fireplace, the one he'd hauled out of the canal at Sowerby in the flood year, and he tapped its flukes with the poker whenever a guest said something foolish.

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The stranger came in on the third night, stamping slush off a borrowed greatcoat and asking for a room and a hot brick. She had a stub of pencil behind one ear and a faded red ribbon knotted at her wrist, and she stared at the anchor so long that Walt asked if she wanted it priced. 'It's not for sale,' she said. 'My grandfather's boat went down under that. He kept the rope.' She pointed at the coil wound round the shank, looped into a figure of eight with no start and no end, and I understood it was the one thing in the room nobody had ever tried to untie.

Over supper she told us what he used to say, that a loop has no bottom to fall through, and that a man only sinks once he stops paddling. Walt snorted into his ale. But she sat by the fire with the snow piling against the shutters and wrote a line on the back of a bill, then folded it into her purse like a receipt.

The road opened on Sunday. Walt got the anchor down at last to polish it and found the rope had been restitched to the iron with fresh tarred twine, neat and recent. Nobody had seen her do it. The red ribbon was gone, the room was made up and empty, and the brick was still warm under the blanket.