Traditional colour tattoo of an anchor wrapped in rope, with a red rose, green waves and black droplets, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bold anchor sits at the centre, with a coiled rope across the top and a red rose with a yellow centre above green wave lines. Black droplets fall beneath the design, and the anchor shank is shaded in grey and black. The thick black outlines and flat, saturated fills of red, yellow, green and orange make this a classic colour composition against a dark background.

Traditional Forearm Anchor Rope Rose Flower Wave Water Droplet

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ossie had kept the coil on the nail above the bench since the November gale, wound clockwise the way his father taught him, so it would run free when it mattered. Nobody on the quay asked why he hadn't thrown it out. They knew the Marigold Rose had gone down with her cable still shackled to the bow, and that the men who came home had come home because the cable parted before the boat did.

Keep reading

The anchor turned up in March, snagged in a trawl net forty miles off the Dogger and hauled aboard by a Danish skipper who had no idea whose it was until he saw the rose scratched into the crown. Young Pell, the cook, had done that himself the summer before, with a nail and a tin of red paint, and had insisted it would bring them luck. Ossie had laughed at him for it then, the daft article.

When the crate came off the lorry in Grimsby, the paint was still there, flaking at the edges, the iron furred with weed. Ossie drew a thumbnail across the petals and felt the cold come up through the metal into his wrist. He bolted the anchor to the shed wall beside the rope, and for a week he went in every morning just to watch the water gather on the flukes and run down into the rust, drip by drip, until the concrete beneath it was spotted dark as a mackerel's back.