Traditional colour tattoo of an anchor and ship wheel within a rope heart, framed by orange flowers, teal leaves and the words INTO THE SEA, on the thigh.

Anchor and ship wheel in a rope heart

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A bold traditional design shows an anchor and ship wheel inside a heart outlined with rope, with a pink and red glow behind them. Orange flowers, teal leaves and scrolls frame the heart, and banners read INTO THE SEA above and YOU and ME below. Thick black outlines and solid colour fills dominate, with soft shading on the anchor and banners.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, because the kettle's not boiling yet and I'm not telling this twice. Old Harry Dunn kept a ship's wheel above his hearth at Saltmarrow Point, brass hub gone green, spokes worn pale where his hands had been. Every man in the Mariner's Rest knew the tale of it, though none of them told it straight.

Keep reading

Harry had a way with rope. Ada, the baker's girl, swore he tied her a heart out of hawser the summer they wed, and he knotted it round the stock of an old anchor so it would hold through anything. He painted two words across the sky above it, INTO THE SEA, because he said a man's road was always that way, out and back. Underneath, in letters a bit wobbly, he put YOU and ME, since a sailor's no use if he can't spell what matters.

Then came the March gale. The smack Mary Ellen went out for cod and didn't come in. Ada walked the harbour wall every evening for a month, shawl pulled up to her eyes, and the sea gave back nothing but a splintered hatch and, one grey morning, the wheel itself, lodged in the shingle as neat as if someone had set it down for her.

Ada carried it home and hung it on the same nail. She never went to sea again, but every spring she re-tarred the rope and tied the heart fresh, and each time she walked down to the water and said the banner aloud. Folks thought her soft. Maybe she was. The gulls always came down to answer her, and that was company enough for a woman who'd kept her side of the bargain.

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