Colour tattoo of a grey anchor wrapped in rope, with a red lotus and teal leaves and blue flame-like lines behind it, on the inner forearm.

Anchor and lotus on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A grey anchor with a rope coiled around its shank sits at the centre of the design, with a red lotus flower and teal leaves below it and pale blue flame-like lines rising behind the anchor. The outlines are bold and the shading is smooth, with highlights on the metal and petals. Colour dominates the composition, which is shown straight on against a plain skin background.

Traditional Neo-trad Forearm Anchor Rope Lotus Leaves Flame Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mrs Tully kept the walled garden behind the harbour cottages at Saltcote, and every spring she told the children the same thing about the pond at its heart. Her grandfather had dropped the anchor there the year the ferry stopped running, tying its rope to the sundial post so the boat could not drift off in the night. The water was deep enough to hide the iron and shallow enough that the lotus grew up round it every summer.

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Nobody believed the pond was deep until the dry year, when the water fell and the anchor showed its crown above the mud. Ben Corran, who had come to lay the new paths, saw the rope wound round the shank and said it looked as if someone had tried to hold the place still. He cut the rope to lift the anchor out, and the lotus that had grown through the chain went grey and slumped in a single morning.

Mrs Tully did not scold him. She sat on the kerb with her hands in her lap and said the anchor had only ever held the garden to the tide that was owed it, and now the tide would come up the path looking for its boat. That autumn the rain fell for a week, the water rose a foot, and the paths flooded. Ben waded out with a borrowed winch, and the anchor went back down into the pond under the lotus leaves.

The following spring the rope came back as a green shoot wound round the stone sundial, and the lotus opened again in the middle of the pond. Ben never cut another rope in that garden. When visitors asked why the pond was left so wild, he pointed at the water and said the garden still had a boat to keep, and that was no business of anyone's to lift.