Black and grey traditional anchor tattoo with a coiled rope wrapped around the shank, shown on the upper arm.

Anchor and rope on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large anchor with a coiled rope wrapped around its shank and a second rope trailing from the ring at the bottom. The anchor is shaded in black and grey with dense hatching on the wooden stock and bold black outlines. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a plain light background, with a blurred indoor setting behind the arm.

Traditional Upper arm Anchor Rope Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up out of the Hollin Cut in March, the week after the flood took the old coal staithe shed. Dad said it was a barge anchor, black with silt, its wooden stock wrapped in rope so rotten it crumbled when Uncle Ray touched it with a boathook. Nobody in Thorpe Hesley had any use for a ship's anchor, but Mr Cowell, who kept the Welfare bar and wanted something for the back wall, gave two pounds for it and scrubbed it with wire in our yard.

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My grandfather had worked the barges down to the staithes before the pit swallowed the valley, and he never once let me touch the rope on his boat. A rope that has held a load, he said, will hold a grudge. So when the anchor came home I sat with it at the kitchen table for an evening, cutting the old hemp off the shank with a penknife, and found underneath a ring of new rope, cream and tarred, bound on so tight it had gone into the wood.

Mam found me at midnight with my fingers bleeding. She didn't say anything about the knife. She fetched the tin where Grandad kept his tally books and unfolded a chart of the cut with a pencilled cross near the bottom lock, where a boat had sunk in the winter of 1938. Beside it, in his square hand, was one line: Keep hold till the water turns. The water never turned for the cut. It turned for the pit, and the pit took the men instead.

I didn't cut the new rope away. On Sunday I carried the anchor down to the lock in a barrow, rubbed the last grey silt from its flukes with my sleeve, and set it on the coping stone where the water lay flat and still. Then I left it there with the rope wound round its neck, the way you leave a hand you haven't finished holding.