Traditional style anchor tattoo with a teal bow across its shaft, placed on the ankle and shown in teal and black ink.

Anchor and teal bow on an ankle

Traditional · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A bold anchor with a dark grey shank and black outlines sits on the ankle, with a teal ribbon bow tied around the shaft. Shading on the anchor is soft and the bow has solid teal fills with dark accents. The tattoo is centred on the photo against a white towel, with the skin tone of the foot lit evenly.

Traditional Ankle Anchor Bow Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The smith at Ostia had cast the anchor too heavy, and by the third morning Marcus was cursing it on the quay, his palms raw from the windlass. I stood at the bollard with a length of ribbon in my fist. My mother had dyed it the colour of shallow water, woad and a pinch of verdigris, and I had carried it all the way from the Subura without once letting it touch the dirt.

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The ship was the Hesperia, bound for Carthage with grain, and her master wanted the iron aboard before the Kalends. Marcus had sailed with my father, and his father before him, and none of them had ever gone out on a cargo without some small foolishness tied to the rigging. He told me to give it here. I wound the ribbon twice round the shank, just below the stock, and knotted it into a bow the way my mother had taught me, leaving two loose tails that would catch the wind.

The men laughed and hauled the anchor onto the lighter. Marcus kissed my forehead, smelling of tar and onions, and promised me a bolt of purple from Carthage if the weather held. The Hesperia cleared the mole that afternoon with her sail full and the teal streaming from the shank like a pennant. I watched until the masts were only a smudge of charcoal against the sky, and then I walked home to wait.

The purple never came. When divers brought iron up from the shallows off Sardinia in the summer, the teal had faded to the colour of the stones, but the bow was still tied, its two tails sharp and neat. The harbour master had it hung on the wall of his office where the sea wind could reach it. I still go down to look at it, and I still have not untied the knot.