Line drawing of a tattoo design in muted lavender ink on white, showing an anchor-like motif with a circle, waves, a diamond and a linear ornament, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and waves tattoo design

Fine line · Colour · Flash

The design is a simple line drawing of an anchor-like symbol with a circle at the top, a horizontal arrow-tipped bar, two small dots and two wave curves above. A diamond hangs from the central shaft, and a horizontal line with an ornamental motif sits at the base. The linework is uniform and thin, rendered in a single muted lavender-grey ink on a plain white background.

Fine line Anchor Wave Circle Diamond Arrow Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you touch that kettle yet, I'm not finished. Where was I? Aye, the cage. Every man at Skelder Pit knew the cage hung from the winding wheel on a chain as thick as a wrist, and every man knew that chain was older than the pit. Old Jack Coulson used to say you could read the whole North Sea in its links if you looked long enough.

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The winter the Mary Seam flooded, the ponies were lost first, then the banksman went down after them and didn't come up. His wife, Nell, walked down to the harbour wall every evening with a stub of chalk and a paraffin lamp. She drew the same mark on the stone each night: a ring on top like the moon, two little waves either side, an arrow pointing the wrong way for the wind, and a diamond hung on a stem. That diamond was the brass check every man carried, the tag the lamp-house hung on a nail so they'd know who was still below.

On the ninth night the lamp-house bell rang twice. Coulson himself had come up through the flooded roadway, grey as slate, and he was holding a brass check he'd found wedged in the sump. He'd carried it up in his teeth to keep his hands free for the ladder. Nell took it from him, turned it over, and there on the back was a second diamond scratched small as a pinhead, and beside it a name she'd never seen written down, which was her husband's own.

Next morning the tide was out and the harbour wall was dry. The chalk ring was still there, half washed away, and the brass check hung on its nail beside it, turning slow, the way a boat does when the water's gone and it hasn't quite noticed yet.