Dark monochrome anchor design with a looping swirl on a person's upper back shoulder, with a blue bra strap visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and swirl design on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A dark, monochrome anchor with a looping curl and a large swirling line sits on the upper back, near the shoulder blade. The lines are thick and uneven, with no visible shading, and the design looks like henna or a similar temporary paint rather than a healed tattoo. The blue strap and blurred people in the background frame the design, and the skin tone is warm.

Shoulder Anchor Swirl Loop Line art

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ship's cook, Old Tamsin Rudd, swore the anchor on the chart-room door had been drawn by the sea itself, because nobody aboard could remember who had painted it. Every spring the dockmen scraped it off with a bit of rope, and every autumn it came back, thick and crooked, the arms bent like a man who had stood too long in the wind.

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When the Marguerite lost her mate off the Horn, the boy Ezra went to the chart room with a pot of tar and a feather brush. He did not know how to draw an anchor, so he drew the one he had seen his father hang above the hearth in Penzance, and then he wanted it to be going somewhere, so he gave it a curl at the top like the tail of a kite. The curl wouldn't close. He tried three times. Tamsin watched from the galley hatch and said nothing, because a tar line that wouldn't close was a thing she had seen before.

The ship came into Valparaiso with the swirl still wet on the door. The harbour master read the mark, shook his head, and let them through without a word about the cargo. Ezra stood at the rail while the anchor went down, and the chain ran out through the hawse like a long quiet sentence.

For years afterwards, sailors who sheltered in that port said the drawing on the Marguerite's door had a loop that finished itself, if you looked at it at dusk. Ezra never went back to check. He had got home, and that was the end of the line.