Colour tattoo of a shaded anchor with rope, an orange lily and a purple lily, placed on the upper arm.

Anchor and lilies on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A dark grey anchor with a rope wound around its shank runs diagonally through the design, with its ring at the top right. An orange lily with yellow stamens sits above a violet lily, both with soft shading and highlights. The tattoo is shown in colour on smooth skin against a dark background, with the anchor providing a strong grey base for the bright flowers.

Neo-trad Realism Upper arm Anchor Rope Lily Flower

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow shut the coast road by four, and by six the only guests left in the Drowned Heron were three ice-boat men stamping slush off their boots by my fire. Father's anchor still hung over the bar where he nailed it the winter the Marigold went down off Spurn. The rope round its shank had gone grey with woodsmoke, and I kept meaning to have it re-whipped before anyone asked why it was there.

Keep reading

The door banged open and Nell Raddon came in with a parcel in oilcloth under one arm and frost in her eyebrows. She said she had walked from the quay because the harbour had frozen flat to the breakwater. Inside the oilcloth were bulbs packed in peat: a dozen tiger lilies, and a handful of violet ones her husband had raised from seed the summer before he sailed for the last time. She wanted them kept in the cellar until the thaw. He had always planted lilies along the anchor in the churchyard bed, she said, because a ship needed something to look at besides water.

I put them by the boiler, where the warmth would keep them from rotting, and sat with her until the ice-boat men fell asleep. In the night the cellar filled with a green smell, and by morning the orange shoots had pushed up through the peat like fists. Nell did not come down to see them. She had gone out before light, and her footprints ran straight across the frozen harbour towards the breakwater, then stopped.

When the road cleared I carried the lilies up and wound the rope round them, feeding the stems through the old ring the way Father had shown me to splice a line. The orange flowers opened first, flaring above the grey iron, and the violet ones came after, low down where the flukes bit into the earth. The ice-boat men said it looked like a wreck that had decided to bloom. I did not argue. I left the cellar door open so the warmth could reach the rest.