Traditional style flash drawing of a teal anchor with a red-tipped fluke pair, a rope coiled around the shank and small black stars scattered around it, on a beige background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and rope traditional flash design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A drawing of an anchor with a rope wrapped around its shank, set against a plain beige background. The anchor body is filled in teal with dark outlines, the flukes and rope use red and brown tones, and small black star shapes are scattered around the design. The composition is centred and symmetrical, in the bold outlined style typical of traditional tattoo flash.

Traditional Anchor Rope Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marigold dragged her anchor twice before Ned Carrow would admit the holding ground in Porth Ysgol was rotten. Sand over clay, he said, and nothing that would bite. So at two in the morning, with the ebb running hard and the rocks a grey smear to leeward, he sent me forward to cut the warp and let her go.

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I did not cut it. I stood at the bow with the knife in my belt and watched the rope run out through the hawse-hole, wet and heavy, a line that had been wound round that iron shank since before my father was born. Carrow shouted my name twice. The third time he came forward himself, swearing, and found me kneeling on the deck with my palm flat on the coil, feeling for the tremble that meant the flukes had caught something.

It had. Not sand, not clay, but a ledge of old wreck iron that nobody had charted. Carrow laughed until he coughed, then took the wheel and brought us round on the turn of the tide, the stars thick and white over the headland. We lay there three weeks while the divers marked the hazard with a buoy painted red. The day we got back to Falmouth he had the anchor and the rope inked on his forearm, and asked the man to add stars for every night we had steered by them.