Black and grey flash sheet of anchor designs with script quotes, including a large engraved-style anchor with rope and a small anchor beside the words I refuse to sink.

Anchor and lettering tattoo flash sheet

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of nine black ink designs on a white background, mainly anchors with rope detail and several script phrases such as I refuse to sink and Let it go. The anchors use fine, sketched linework with light shading, while the lettering is in a flowing script style. The layout is evenly spaced, with a small block of paragraph text in the top left corner.

Lettering Anchor Rope Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Penhallow had kept the chandlery on Quay Street for thirty-one years, and in all that time few customers had walked in without already knowing what they meant to hold. The young man who came in on the Tuesday was different. He had a duffel bag over one shoulder and a cracked phone in his hand, and he stood among the coils of manila looking at the brass fittings as if they might give him directions. He wanted a shackle, he said, something that wouldn't rust through in a winter.

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She took down a galvanised one and set it on the counter between them. Outside, grey water slapped against the harbour wall and a gull walked along the rail as though it owned the place. He turned the shackle over twice and asked whether she had ever sailed past the breakwater. She said she had once, with her husband, before the ferry stopped running on Sundays. He nodded slowly, as if that answered something he had come to ask.

He talked while she wrapped the shackle in brown paper. He spoke about the old cable his father had lost off the Scillies, and how the anchor had come up through the murk with a fisherman's cap tangled in its flukes. Ada didn't interrupt. Some things a person has to set down on a counter before they can carry anything else, and she had learnt not to hurry anyone past that point.

When he left, the bell over the door rang twice. He had forgotten his receipt, so she folded it into her apron pocket. Later, sweeping under the hooks where he had stood, she found a pencil sketch lying face down: an anchor with its rope curling into a loose spiral, and beneath it, in careful capitals, the words HOLD ON, THEN LET GO.