Traditional style flash design of an anchor wrapped in rope with a ship's wheel, two swallows and a laurel wreath, drawn on torn paper over wooden boards.

Anchor and ship wheel with swallows

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows an anchor with rope coiled around it and a ship's wheel behind, framed by a laurel wreath and with a swallow at each top corner. Bold black outlines, solid black shading and dotted stippling define the rope, wheel spokes and waves at the base. The drawing is rendered in black, grey and cream tones on a tan, torn paper background set against wood planks.

Traditional Anchor Ship wheel Rope Swallow Laurel Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ship's wheel came down from the box room in October, wrapped in a bolster case and bound with three turns of tarred line. Nobody had paid for that room since August, and Mr Lusk had gone out in the rain with his collar up and no forwarding address, so I told myself I had the right to open his trunk. The wheel lay on top. Beneath it was a coil of rope so stiff with salt that it rang when I set it on the boards.

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I had let rooms at the Gull's Rest for thirty-one years and had learned that a lodger's luggage tells you more than his letters. Mr Lusk had been a deckhand on the Margaret Tallis, a barquentine that went onto the Mardle Bank in a February gale before I was married. Eleven men were aboard and he was the only one who came ashore. The swallows nesting under our eaves that summer were the first he had seen since, and he used to sit on the front step with his tea, counting them two at a time as if they owed him money.

The anchor was not in the trunk. I found it in the back garden under the rhubarb, where he must have dragged it up from the beach on one of his walks, its fluke as long as my forearm and its shank furred with weed. I did not know whether to laugh or ring the coastguard. Instead I scrubbed it with wire wool until the iron showed grey, carried it indoors and set it beside the wheel on the hall table.

When the swallows came back in April I bound the rope around the spokes the way a sailor would and hung the wheel above the door of the room he had paid for in advance and never slept in. Two birds landed on the top spoke as if they had been invited. I left the window open that night, though the wind was cold, so they could find their way in if they wanted to.