Realistic anchor with a chain and a pink lily tattooed on the side of a torso, above the waistband of grey trousers.

Anchor and lily on the side ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A realistic anchor wrapped in a chain sits on the side of the torso, with a pink lily in full bloom in front of its shank and lower arm. The anchor is shaded in greys and black to look three-dimensional, while the lily has soft pink petals with highlights and yellow-green stamens. The photo is taken at an angle, with the tattoo centred in the frame and a striped top and grey waistband visible at the edges.

Realism Ribs Anchor Chain Lily Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lily had been Dorota's idea, not mine, and Kestle Harbour had not stopped talking about it since the Maud Ellen came in with the spring tide. Ned Carraway stood on the slipway with a bucket of gurnard and watched the boat nose against the wall, the new anchor hung off the bow the way it always had been, the chain running through the hawse like it had somewhere to be.

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He had seen the anchor on his father's boat for thirty years. It had lost its colour long before it lost its grip, and everyone assumed the old man would let it rust where it sat. Instead, the winter before, Dorota had come down the quay with a sketch in a plastic wallet and asked Ned, as if it were nothing, whether he could find a flower that wasn't a daisy to go with the iron. He had found a lily. Pink, the sort that grew wild on the cliff path above the lifeboat house, heavy-headed and a bit stubborn about the wind.

The Maud Ellen hauled out on the Tuesday. Dorota kept the chain in her hands while the crane lifted the anchor clear of the hull, and she laughed when it swung and scraped the cobbles, and said the iron had been waiting twenty years for a bit of colour. Ned did not say what he thought, which was that the flower would die in a week and the anchor would outlast all of them.

But on the slip that evening the lily caught the last of the sun, and the water below turned the same colour, and for once the boat looked like it was not only holding on to the bottom of the sea but had decided to go somewhere in bloom.