Traditional style tattoo of a grey shaded anchor with a purple ribbon wrapped around it, on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and purple ribbon on the side

Traditional · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A grey shaded anchor with a rope-like shank and a ring at the top sits in the centre of the design, with a purple ribbon looping around its stock and curling down across the flukes. The linework is bold and black, and the anchor is shaded with silver-grey highlights while the ribbon has a glossy purple finish. The design is shown close up on the side of the body against plain pale skin.

Traditional Ribs Anchor Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the anchor where your father left it, half sunk in the grass at the end of row nine, its shank furred with rust and its flukes pointing at the Bramley trees as if it meant to haul them down to the river. Late August has baked the orchard to a biscuit colour. Wasps work the windfalls. The ring at the top is still bright where a hand has rubbed it for forty years.

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Nobody in the village remembers why he brought it up from the Medway wharf in the back of the Bedford van. He never said. He only said it wanted a job, so he set it in a bucket of concrete beside the gate and hung the first Discovery windfalls on its chain, and the blackbirds learned to sit on it while they waited for the sun to leave the fruit.

This morning there was a ribbon knotted round the stock, purple and new, the kind sold in packs at the church fete. Your sister tied it there before dawn, saying nothing, and then went back to the house without her tea. You untie it and it slides through your fingers like something wet. You do not take it off. You loop it twice more round the iron and pull it tight, so the wind coming off the orchard has something to argue with.

By noon the picking ladders are steaming in the heat. You climb to the last rung, reach over the anchor and lay your palm flat on the cold metal. Below you the windfalls keep dropping into the grass with soft, ordinary thuds, as though nothing in the orchard has changed, and you stand there listening to them until the wasps move on.