Black and grey anchor tattoo with rope detail on the forearm, with a red balloon tied to it by a thin string, in traditional style.

Anchor and red balloon on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey anchor with a coiled rope wrapped around its shank sits on the forearm, with a loose rope tail curling at the bottom. A thin line runs from the anchor's ring up to a shaded red balloon at the top of the image. The anchor uses bold outlines and solid black fill, while the balloon has smooth, glossy shading in red, and the photo is set against a plain black background.

Traditional Forearm Anchor Balloon Rope String

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Gull Mary liked the balloon. Cook said a thing that flew over a ship bound for sea was bad luck, and Hettie Rowe, who had the foredeck watch, said it was worse luck to let a child cry on a quay. So when the balloon seller in Whitby pressed the string into my palm instead of his wife's, I stowed it under the bread bin with the tide tables and told myself it was for the girl I'd promised a gull feather.

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The sea off the Dogger Bank does not care for sentiment. By the third night the wind had backed to the north-east and the fog came down thick enough to lose a lamp at arm's length. Cook had tied my string to the ring of the spare anchor lashed amidships, so we could tell by the bob of red where the iron sat, and the men laughed at it until the sea began to lift the anchor against its lashings.

It went at four bells in the morning. The lashing parted with a crack like a musket, the anchor slid to the lee rail, and the string ran through my palm before I understood what I was holding. I held on. The balloon pulled up into the fog, and for one long minute the iron hung off the gunwale with the black water below it and the red thing above, and then the string burned through my glove and the anchor went down into the grey without a sound.

We limped into Whitby on the Thursday with a sprung topmast and no spare. The anchor is lying somewhere off Flamborough, I suppose, under a lot of sand. I kept the end of the string. I still bend my rope into coils the way Cook taught me, and I still think of that one thing aboard that was meant to go up instead of down.