Black ink flash drawing of an anchor wrapped in rope with the word SAILORS in ornate lettering across it, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Anchor and SAILORS lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a ship's anchor with a rope coiled around the shaft, with the word SAILORS set in decorative capitals across the middle. The linework is fine and precise, using hatching and cross-hatching for shading on the anchor, rope and letterforms. It is drawn in black ink on a plain light background, with a fine-liner pen lying across the lower edge of the frame.

Lettering Traditional Anchor Rope Lettering Sailor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Corran had the hawser laid out across the loft floor, tarred black and stiff as a bell rope, when the men from the Polruan boat climbed the ladder and asked for the anchor her father had promised them. Her father had been dead five weeks. The anchor was still on the quay below the net store, where he had set it in the spring of fifty-two, a ship's bower with one fluke bent back like a broken finger, and nobody in Porthgwidden had ever been able to say who had painted the word across its stock in red lead.

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'He said it was for sailors,' said the eldest of them, Harry Vosper, turning his cap in his hands. 'Said we could have it when we'd all come home.'

She knew the story, because her father had told it every Christmas over the pilchards. Each man who came back from the long voyages had to tie a knot in the rope at the foot of the anchor, one knot for each year he had been gone, and say his own name aloud while he pulled it tight. The rope had grown so heavy with knots over the years that it could no longer be lifted by one man alone. Her father had never tied one of his own. He said he had never been away long enough.

Nell went down the ladder without a word and walked to the quay. In the grey light the knots looked like the bones of something. She counted them with her thumb, then untied the first one, passed the loose end to Harry Vosper, and told him to pull.