Black line drawing flash design of an anchor wrapped in rope beside a ship's wheel, with the words Guide me in your truth and Anchor me in your love.

Anchor and ship wheel with quote lettering

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a ship's anchor with rope coiled around its shaft, next to a spoked ship's wheel. Two lines of handwritten lettering, Guide me in your truth and Anchor me in your love, sit beside the motifs. The hatched shading and outlines are in black on a plain white background, with the elements arranged in a loose, balanced composition.

Anchor Ship wheel Rope Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the wheel came off the Margaret Ann this morning. Your brother hauled it up the slip in a fish barrow, swearing at every spoke, and I didn't tell him to hush because I'd have been swearing too. The brass boss is still stiff with salt. He wants it for the hall wall, but I told him it's yours to say so, since you were the one who spun it on the wet Sunday your father let you steer her past the breakwater.

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The bank came in the week after the funeral and had its papers out before the kettle boiled. They took the nets, the engine and the chart table with your initials scratched under the lid. They left the anchor because nobody will pay to lift a sixty pound pattern out of the mud at Staithes. So it sits on the quay by the bait shed, rope still knotted round the shank the way he tied it, a bowline with the extra turn he said was for luck and not for seamanship.

I haven't touched the knot. I walk past it every morning with my tea and tell it the weather, which is the same weather it always was, grey over the harbour mouth and the gulls fighting over the crab pots. Come home when the ferry's in. You needn't bring anything except yourself and the wheel key you took off the hook in March.

Ruth