Sepia photograph of a black ink anchor tattoo with rope and script reading 'My Hope is the anchor of my soul' on the side of the body, above a lace top.

Anchor and script tattoo on the side

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A sepia-toned photograph shows a black ink anchor wrapped in rope, with script lettering arranged around it reading 'My Hope is the anchor of my soul'. The linework is bold and outlined with some shading on the anchor and rope. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso, with a dark lace top visible across the lower part of the frame.

Traditional Lettering Ribs Anchor Rope Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guy rope on the big top had frayed to a grey whisker by the time you reached it, and Mr Carrow was already bellowing from the caravan steps that the wind would have the whole canvas down before the second house. You had come to the fair in March with a kitbag, a tin of tallow and your late father's knots, and nobody on the lot had asked what a man who'd fished out of Grimsby wanted with sorting ropes for a travelling show. You sat on an upturned crate and started splicing.

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Carrow's daughter brought you tea in a jam jar and read aloud the sampler that hung above the strongman's bunk, the one her mother had stitched before the fever took her. Edwin could not read it without his jaw working, so Dilys read it to him each night in the lamplight: My hope is the anchor of my soul. You learned the words the way you learned tides, by repetition, until they stopped being sentences and became weather you could steer by.

The gale came in off the marsh at four in the afternoon, with rain behind it like thrown gravel. Every stake on the lot began to sing. You went out with the strongman and a hooked iron anchor from the old trawler that Carrow kept for luck, and you walked the sodden rope out to the tent pole and made the knot your father swore by. Edwin leaned his whole weight on the line while the canvas bellied and cracked above you, and it held.

In the morning the lot was a field of puddles and torn paper. You found the sampler folded inside the coiled rope where Dilys had left it for you, and beneath it a note in pencil: Keep the knot. You tucked the bundle under your arm and walked to the road, where the next town's sign was already leaning in the ditch.