Black and grey anchor tattoo with three banners reading a quote, shaded in a traditional style on the side of the ribs.

Anchor and quote banner on ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded anchor with a rope at the top and a shield-like base sits behind three curling banners, which carry the words "You can not discover new oceans unless you are willing to lose sight of the shore". The linework is bold and the shading uses dense hatching and stippling for depth. The tattoo is in black and grey on pale skin, photographed straight on and filling most of the frame.

Traditional Lettering Ribs Anchor Banner Ribbon Quote Rope Shield

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cass Tully came up from the chart room at four bells with the Admiralty plate under one arm and salt drying on her sleeves. Nobody aboard the Marguerite had told her she could sail past the printed edge of the world, and I told her so myself, loud enough for the mate to hear. She only asked me to hold the lantern steady.

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We were nine days out of Penzance with the wind backing west. The chart she carried had been drawn by a man who had never left the Scillies, and its blank corner had been waiting for someone with more nerve than sense. Cass pricked a point there with the dividers, then measured the depth off the lead line we'd thrown at dusk. Fourteen fathoms. Then twelve. Then nothing at all, and the lead came up clean.

The men called it mutiny when she wanted the bow kept on the new heading. I called it sensible, which is what a bosun calls a thing once he has decided to agree with it. We lost sight of Cornwall on the eleventh morning, and the crew went quiet the way men do when the land stops being a promise. Cass stood at the rail and did not look back once, and I knew then she had never been sailing toward anything. She was sailing away from the shore.

We found a reef of black rock and a bay thick with birds that had never seen a hull. Cass inked it onto the plate in her small square capitals and dated it beneath. When we came home the chart went into a drawer at the Falmouth customs house and nobody asked for it back. I kept the lead line. Fourteen fathoms, twelve, and then the long grey nothing, coiled on my cabin shelf where the morning light falls.