Small black and grey anchor and ship's wheel tattoo on the side of a person's ribs, beside a black bikini strap.

Anchor and ship's wheel on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a small anchor stacked above a ship's wheel, both tattooed in black ink on the side of a torso. The linework is fine with soft grey shading that gives the anchor and wheel some depth. The rest of the frame is in muted tones, with a grey top, a black bikini strap and a pink and black bracelet on the wrist, and the composition is cropped to the torso and arm.

Fine line Ribs Anchor Ship's wheel Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the lantern steady, Tomasz, the tide won't wait on your nerves. Old Fenwick had said it every night for forty years, and the night the Greta Lind dragged her anchor across the Skerry Bank he said it twice, which was how Tomasz knew the old man was frightened.

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The coaster came in with her wheelhouse stove and her crew shouting over the wind. Fenwick climbed the wet deck with his knees cracking like kindling, pried the wheel loose from the broken binnacle, and lashed it to the steering gear with two shackles and a length of tarred rope. "A ship's only as good as the thing that turns her," he told the mate, and nobody argued, because nobody had a better idea.

They cleared the Skerry before dawn. The bow anchor had gone with the chain, down through forty fathoms of grey water where no one would ever find it. Tomasz, who had hauled on that rope all night and could no longer feel his hands, asked why they hadn't gone back for it. Fenwick pointed at the second anchor still hanging scarred and whole at the starboard bow, and said some things were meant to stay where you left them.

Years later Tomasz kept the wheel in his shed in Harrowgate, its spokes gone green at the hub. On still mornings, when the harbour bell carried across the water, he would take it down, rest his palm on the cold brass, and feel the deck lean beneath him.