Close-up of a fine black anchor and script lettering reading refuse to sink, tattooed on a person's shoulder above the collarbone.

Anchor and script quote on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black anchor sits at the left of the frame, followed by cursive script that reads refuse to sink, with the start of the phrase cropped at the edge. The linework is thin and solid, with no visible shading, and the ink is a single dark tone against pale skin. The tattoo sits along the shoulder and collarbone area, with a dark top filling the lower left of the composition.

Fine line Lettering Shoulder Anchor Script Quote

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's been wet since Tuesday. Sit where you can see the mouth of the harbour, because that's where this starts, with the boat that wouldn't go down. Her name was the Hester Vane, built in Scarrow yard by a man who drank more than he measured. Every timber in her leaked a little, and every winter she came home with the sea sloshing in her boots.

Keep reading

Old Ned Corrie owned her, and he was too stubborn to sell. One February gale took her off the Brinn bar and rolled her three times. The two men aboard got ashore on a rope and a prayer. When the lifeboat crew hauled the hulk onto the slip, they found a fresh anchor chain still shackled to her bow, and somebody had scratched words into the wet paint of her transom with a nail: refuse to sink. Nobody knew who. Ned swore it was his wife Agnes, who could never spell and never gave up on anything.

So they patched her all that spring, the whole quay turning up with tar pots and sail thread. She went back out in May. Ned cut the anchor into her wheelhouse door that summer, and beneath it, in the looping hand they taught at the parish school, he copied the same four words. He said a man should carry the thing he'd nearly lost. Mind you, he never put to sea again without Agnes standing on the pier, arms folded, watching him out past the bar.

The Hester Vane is still tied up at the far wall, and if the tide's right you can see her transom from here. Read it slowly. The paint's newer than the words, and the words are older than anyone on this quay.