Black lettering design of a two-line quote about an anchor and wings, with a hanging chain, a small anchor and a bird silhouette, shown on a plain white background.

Anchor and wings quote lettering design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design is a black printed or drawn quote arranged in five rows of text, with a chain hanging from the top centre to a black anchor and a small bird silhouette at the upper right. The lettering is a clean, handwritten-style script with even linework and no shading. The artwork is entirely in black ink on white, with the text filling most of the frame and the anchor placed centrally beneath the lines.

Lettering Anchor Chain Bird Wing Quote Script text Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The harbour master at Porthaven told Tobias Penhale that a boat without an anchor was only a bucket waiting for the sea to take it, so Tobias forged one for his wife Ada from an old length of ship's chain and a keel bolt he had pulled from a wreck on the Scarrow rocks. He hung the chain from the bow of the ferry where the whole village could see it. Ada did not care for the ferry. She cared for the sky, and she spent her mornings on the cliff path counting the gulls and telling him which way the wind would turn before the weathervane on the chapel had finished deciding.

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In October the wind came round to the south-west and stayed there. The ferry tore loose from its moorings with Tobias aboard, checking the fenders, and the surf took him over the side in the dark. Ada heard the bell from the wrecked slip and ran down the path with a sailcloth kite she had been mending all summer. She ran the line up from the headland, let the wind take the cloth, and pulled the kite hard against the gale until the wind lifted it above the surf and the chain on the bow came up through the spray like a rope thrown to a drowning dog. Tobias caught it with both hands.

At first light they found the chain coiled neatly on the quay with the anchor end laid on top, and a small black bird perched on the rail above it, watching the water as if it had been there all night. Nobody in Porthaven ever said why the chain was kept oiled after that, or why the ferry was never again moored without a kite tied to the bow.