Colour tattoo of a rope-wrapped anchor with pink roses, blue flowers and green leaves on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and roses on a foot

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

A rope-wrapped anchor in black outline runs up the top of the foot, with its crossbar near the ankle and its flukes near the toes. Pink roses, pale blue flowers and green leaves climb the rope and fill the upper and lower sections of the anchor. The botanical shading is soft and colour dominates, while the anchor uses engraved-style black linework with light hatching.

Botanical Other Anchor Rope Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the year the last tide went out past Saltmere and did not come back, Ada Rendle dragged the old anchor up the shingle on a sledge made from a cart wheel and told her brother to stop asking why. Everyone knew the sea had gone somewhere else. The harbour wall stood like a row of broken teeth over grey mud, and the gulls had learned to nest in the chapel roof.

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The anchor had come off the Mercy Vane the winter before the water left. Its rope was still wound round the shank, stiff as bark, and someone, Ada's grandmother perhaps, had tied roses into it: pink ones, and pale blue flowers that the salt never quite took, with green trailing stems that climbed the rope to the crossbar. Nobody in Saltmere could say why. Folk said a rose in a boat's rope kept the boat from drowning, and folk said a great many things before the tide went.

Ada scrubbed the flukes with sand and vinegar until the engraved lines showed, hatched like rain on a window. She hung the anchor on the chapel door, flukes down, so that anyone walking under it had to stoop towards the ground. Her brother asked again what it was for. She told him the sea was a patient thing, and that it could be called back by something it had once held.

On the ninth night the mud shone. By morning the water was lapping at the harbour wall, cold and clean, with the roses floating on it, pink and blue, the rope trailing behind like a line of thread. Ada stood ankle deep and did not step back. The anchor, she said, had only ever been holding its place for the sea to come home to.