Realistic colour tattoo of a grey anchor wrapped in rope and pink roses with blue flowers, on the outer thigh.

Anchor and roses on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large anchor sits vertically across the thigh, with a rope coiled around its shaft and pink roses and small blue flowers climbing up and around it. The anchor is rendered in soft grey and green shading with smooth gradients, giving it a three-dimensional, realistic look. The pastel pinks and blues contrast with the muted grey metal, and the design fills the frame from the top of the thigh down to the lower leg.

Realism Botanical Thigh Anchor Rose Flower Rope Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Penhallow had been splicing the same length of manila since the ferry failed to come in on Tuesday, and her fingers had gone stiff with tar and cold. On the slipway below the chandlery the tide was turning, sliding green over the weed, and the old anchor that had lain in the shingle since her grandfather's time lay with it, half-buried, its shank furred with barnacles.

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The islanders called it the Tern Rock anchor, though nothing had been moored to it in forty years. Her mother had planted pink roses against the chandlery wall the summer Ada was born, and every June they came up through the salt-cracked render and tangled over the cottage gate. Ada had never much liked them. They smelt of soap and churchyards. But when the storm took the lower bay wall in February, the roses were the only thing on the island still standing green, and she had started, without quite deciding to, twining their long canes around the rope she was mending.

Gideon from the mainland office came out on the Thursday boat with a clipboard and a face like wet paper. He wanted the anchor cut up for scrap, the slipway fenced, the whole lot sold to the council for a proper breakwater. Ada took him down to the shingle and showed him the rope. Every strand she had spliced was bound with a thread of bramble and rose wire, and the flowers had gone to hips in the cold, bright as little lamps.

He stood there a long while. Then he turned his clipboard over and wrote nothing on it. "Leave it, then," he said, and the tide came in over the old iron and did not take it.