Black linework anchor wrapped in rope with three swallows flying upward, set over teal and pink watercolour washes on skin at the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and swallows with watercolour splashes

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a black anchor with a coiled rope, with four small black swallows flying up and away from its top-left corner. Bold outlines and solid black fills define the anchor, while the birds and rope are drawn with finer strokes. Soft teal, blue and pink watercolour splashes spread behind the anchor and across the lower area, and the composition runs diagonally from the lower right to the upper left.

Ribs Anchor Rope Swallow Bird Watercolour Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sim Harrow found the swallows at first light, four of them wheeling low over the forecastle head where the bower cable ran into the hawse. Nobody aboard the Corinna had seen land in nineteen days, and he stood under the anchor with his tea gone cold in his hand while the rope creaked against the windlass.

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Ada Pell came up behind him, barefoot, her shawl knotted at the throat. "Birds don't come out this far," she said. "They come from somewhere close." She said it the way her father used to say things, flat and certain, and Sim turned his cap around in his fingers because he had no argument to make. Her father had rigged this anchor in Bristol the year before the sea took him, and she had never once let the crew forget the chain was older than most of them.

The headland showed grey through the mist, a thumb of rock with a white lighthouse stuck on the end like a tooth. The swallows dipped toward it, then came back over the bow as though they were counting the crew. Sim bent to the pennant, meaning to cut the rope free and let them have the morning, but Ada put her hand on his wrist.

"Leave it," she said. "It's holding us, and it's the only thing out here that knows where the bottom is."

The launch came out from the quay after noon. By then the four birds were specks above the rocks, and the anchor was still in the bay, holding the Corinna steady over sand and weed while the tide turned round it.