Black and grey script lettering reading Philippians 4:13 over a dark anchor tattoo on the upper arm.

Anchor and Philippians 4:13 on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on the upper arm showing the words Philippians 4:13 in flowing script, with a solid dark anchor overlapping the lettering. The lettering uses smooth, fine shading with slight blue-grey tones, while the anchor is filled in dark grey with a bright highlight along its edge. The composition is tightly cropped on the arm with the design sitting slightly off centre.

Lettering Upper arm Anchor Script Lettering Bible verse

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barometer in the wheelhouse of the Constance Mary had been sulking since Scarborough, and by the fourth night out of Lowestoft the needle had given up pretending. Skipper Eli Ransome stood with his cap pulled low, reading the swell like a letter he did not want to finish. I was twenty-two and mostly useless, so I coiled ropes and watched his jaw.

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The fleet had scattered. Three boats were still on the radio, and the Jenny Wren had lost her net twice before dawn. Ransome took the wheel himself, shouting over the diesel that the anchor was going down whatever the sea wanted. We dropped it in the lee of the Haisborough Sands, and the chain ran out screaming through the hawse pipe until it bit. Then we waited. Every man on deck looked at the ropes, not at each other.

Somewhere past midnight the wind eased to a grumble. Ransome sat on an upturned crate with a stub of pencil and wrote a line on the back of a tide table, then folded it into his oilskin. I asked him what it said. He said it was something his mother had told him the year his brother drowned: that he could bear whatever came, through the one who gave him strength. Then he laughed at himself and said it sounded daft at three in the morning.

At first light the Jenny Wren limped in under her own steam, and the Constance Mary's anchor came up with a bright new scar on its shank. Ransome ran his thumb along it, the way you'd press a bruise to check it was still there. "Holds," he said. That was all. I have carried that word about with me for thirty years, like a spare shackle in my pocket, and I have never once needed to say it out loud.