Colour traditional tattoo of a rope-wrapped anchor with pink roses and green leaves on the outer thigh.

Anchor and pink roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A rope-wrapped anchor runs down the outer thigh, with two pink roses at the top and another two lower on the shank, plus small rosebuds and green leaves. The design uses bold black outlines with grey shading inside the anchor and the rope. Pink and green ink dominate the composition, which is cropped to the thigh against a dark garment and a blue plastic sheet.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hetty, the wind has dropped at last and the Marguerite Lee is lying becalmed off the Azores, so I have time to write properly. You asked in your last whether the anchor on the bosun's chest was the same one that hung off the bow, and I have been thinking about it since. It is not. The one on the bow is iron and it has never once come up without a fight. The one Mr Dunstable had inked is a picture of what he wanted it to be: a thing you can hold on to, with roses twined round it because his wife grew them along the wall at Deptford. He showed me the drawing before the artist in Portsmouth set to. Black lines, pink petals, green leaves he insisted were the exact green of her gate.

Keep reading

The ship's cook says the roses are a lie, that no sailor needs flowers wrapped round his anchor. I told him the anchor is the lie, really. Nothing holds in a storm but rope and luck, and the rope is the only part of it that ever gave him any trouble. He spent two days in the galley with the lamp burning, drawing it out on the back of a chart, the coils running down the shank exactly the way his father's rope ran down the capstan.

When we made the Lizard last Tuesday he pulled up his sleeve on the quarterdeck and showed the whole watch, the roses bright in the spray. Nobody laughed. Then he rolled the sleeve down, went below, and I heard him tell the lamp that the flowers had come out better than the originals. I will tell you the truth, Hetty, that I envied him the ink. Yours, Tom.

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