Black and grey anchor tattoo with a rope coiled around it on a person's ribs, shaded in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and rope tattoo on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black and grey anchor with a coiled rope around its shank, shown on the side of the torso below a black mesh bra. The anchor has solid outlines, shaded fills and a dark, slightly worn ink appearance. The framing is tight on the torso, with the hair and a grey top filling the right side of the frame.

Traditional Ribs Anchor Rope Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pass closed on Tuesday, and by Thursday the snow had covered the bottom of the front windows, so nobody was going anywhere, least of all the travelling salesman who had arrived with a case of brass buttons and a cold he refused to admit to. Mother put him in the room over the kitchen, where the chimney breast keeps the wall warm, and I went down to the cellar for cider.

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The anchor hangs over the fireplace, iron as tall as a child and black with a century of smoke. Grandfather bought it at a sale in Whitby, swearing it came off the collier Harriet Dowd, and the day he hung it he wound a length of tarred rope round the shank. A hand should always be able to pick up the line, he said. Nobody ever had. The salesman sat beneath it that evening with his tea and asked why the rope was still there when the ship had been gone so long.

I didn't know. So after midnight, with the wind working at the shutters and the salesman snoring overhead, I lifted the anchor from its hooks, which took both arms and most of my nerve. Pressed flat between two turns of tar and hemp was an oilskin packet no bigger than a hymn book. Inside, in a careful hand, a master had written that the Harriet Dowd had not foundered at all but been sold in a Dutch harbour, and that he would wait in the snow for whoever came looking.

I read it twice by the stove. Then I wound the rope back round the shank, the way my grandfather had taught me, and left the loose end hanging free for the next hand.