Traditional style tattoo of a black anchor with two red roses on the side of the ribs, shown under a raised arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and roses on the side ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black anchor with a rope wrapped around its shank is tattooed with two red roses, one at the top of the shank and one near the base of the flukes. The anchor uses bold dark outlines with grey shading, while the roses are filled in flat red with darker red detail. The tattoo sits centrally against pale skin, with a white vest top and a dark background framing the lower part of the image.

Traditional Ribs Anchor Rose Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mo Halloran had been told the anchor was for the high wire, that Mr Pelling would hang it from the centre pole of the big top to steady the rigging in the wind, and she had believed him for a whole season. Now the Cosmopolitan Brothers were winter-quartered in a field outside Skegness with half the tent sold off, and the anchor sat in the mud by the caravans where the rain could get at it.

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She crouched beside it with a tin of red paint borrowed from the farrier. The rope that had once bound its shank had rotted to a black stub, and she had nothing to replace it with except a length of old guy line she had been saving since June. Her hands were cold. Pelling's last letter lay in her coat pocket, folded in four, promising the pay would come through by March.

She painted the first rose on the crown of the shank, working the petals outward the way her mother had taught her on tea trays, dabbing darker red into the centres until they looked less like paint and more like something a sailor might have carried home from a port. The second went near the flukes, where the anchor would have dragged along the seabed if it had ever been let down into water at all.

When the light failed she wrapped the new line round the iron, knotted it twice, and sat back on her heels. Somewhere behind the wagons a horse stamped. Tomorrow she would take the thing to the scrap yard in Boston and sell it by weight, and the roses would go under with it. Tonight the anchor looked as though it had decided to hold on regardless.