Black and grey blackwork tattoo of an anchor over stippled sea waves and a rising sun, set inside a diamond shape on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and sea waves in a diamond

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A diamond-shaped tattoo shows a white anchor knocked out of layered, wavy sea lines, with a sun rendered as concentric rings at the top. The linework is fine and combines solid lines with dense dot stippling to create texture and shading. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the frame against a plain skin tone and dark background.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Anchor Sea Wave Sun Diamond

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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

The copper came to me from Whitby in a crate packed with horsehair, nine plates for the Admiralty's new chart of the approaches, and the foreman told me not to breathe on them. I had cut stipple for eleven years by then. Dots for the shoal water, hatched lines for the swell, and in the bottom corner of each sheet, the anchor that told a master he could drop his hook.

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Halvard Pym, who ran the shop on Narrow Quay, had a rule that every line answered to a depth sounding. He sent me up to the loft one wet March to check the sixth plate, which had come back from the printers with a smudge where the sun should be. The trouble was quick enough to find. Someone had cut the sun's rings too wide, so the dawn on the page looked like a tide that had gone out for good.

I spent three nights rebuilding those rings with a graver no thicker than a hair, working by a candle that spat each time the sea wind found the gap under the door. On the third night I noticed the anchor was reversed in the plate, its shank biting the wrong way, and I laughed out loud alone up there. A printer's slip like that would have put a fishing smack on the Lundy rocks.

Pym came up at first light, looked at the ring of sun, and said nothing for so long I thought I had been dismissed. Then he tapped the anchor with one finger. 'Leave it,' he said. 'Some skipper will read it backwards and live.' We sent the plate out unchanged, and I still picture a man in a sou'wester squinting at it by lamplight, tracing the wrong way home.