Black anchor tattoo with pink roses and a chain link on the upper chest, beside the neckline of a dark top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and roses on the chest

Chest · Mixed · Photo

A dark anchor with an ornate crossbar sits on the upper chest, with a chain running down its shank. Pale pink roses and green leaves wrap around the lower flukes and stem, shaded with soft tones. The anchor is in the top right of the frame, cropped at the edge, and a navy top fills the left side.

Chest Anchor Rose Chain Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada, the ship's rigger, a Glasgow man called Pruitt, has been up on the forecastle all morning fussing over the anchor. The old stock came off in the Bay of Biscay after a sprung shank, and the bosun wants it sent back to Bristol for mending, so for three weeks we've been hauling a spare up from the hold. Pruitt says the new one wants dressing before the Captain sees it. I told him a ship's anchor needs no dressing. He told me I'd never been asked to look at one thing for eleven months straight.

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What he meant was the roses. Somewhere off the Horn he took a tin of paint and a brush no wider than a fingernail and wound pink roses round the lower flukes, with green leaves climbing the stock. The chain he left plain, a black run of links looping down the shank as if the anchor had been holding onto it for years. The men call it the garden. Mr Hale says it's unseemly, then stands beside it longer than anyone at the watch change, touching the rose nearest the crossbar with one thumb, as if checking it is still wet.

Last night the swell came up and the whole rig groaned, and I thought of you on the pier at Avonmouth with your hat held down against the wind. I don't know whether the roses are meant to say we'll come home, or only that somebody once bothered to make a thing beautiful where nobody would think to look. Pruitt says it's both, and that the sea doesn't mind which.

We raise the Cape on Thursday, if the glass holds. Keep the lamp lit in the back window. I'll write again from Port Elizabeth, and if the post goes missing you'll know it was the sea that kept quiet, not me. Your brother, Tom.