Black ink tattoo of an anchor woven through an infinity symbol, with the script words refuse to sink beneath it, on skin.

Anchor and infinity with script

Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a ship's anchor with its shank passing through the loops of an infinity symbol, with the words refuse to sink in cursive script below. The linework is solid black and of even weight, with no shading or colour. The design is centred on a plain, lightly lit area of skin with the anchor and infinity sitting on the left and the lettering running to the right.

Anchor Infinity symbol Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up out of the orchard pond on the second Saturday of August, when the water had dropped low enough to show its crown. Dad had sunk it there himself in 1979, he said, lashed to a pallet of windfalls so the cider press would not walk away down the slope. Nobody believed him until Tom waded in with a rope and found the shank furred with green weed.

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Dad had sailed coasters out of Avonmouth for twenty years before he bought the Pearmain field, and he never got used to land standing still. He kept a length of brass chain coiled on the kitchen windowsill and a tide table pinned beside the kettle, though the orchard was twelve miles from any water wider than a ditch. When the wind got into the Bramleys in October he would stand at the back door and count the gusts aloud, like a man reading a barometer.

We hauled the anchor onto the grass with the tractor. Its flukes had rusted into a brown lace, but the ring at the top was still sound, and Dad ran his thumb over the stamped letters on the shank while the wasps worked the windfalls. Refuse to sink, he read, which was what the bosun used to bellow when a hull was taking water. I asked whether it was a motto or a warning. He went inside to put the kettle on without answering.

We hung it from the old perry pear by the gate, where the lane bends back on itself across the field. Every evening since, I walk the rows with my hand trailing along the chain, the way he once checked his mooring lines, and I count the fruit still holding on to the boughs, the way he counted gusts.