Sheet of fourteen black ink anchor designs on a beige paper background, several with rope, rings or a ship's wheel, in a traditional hand-drawn style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor designs on a flash sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of fourteen anchor designs drawn in black ink on a textured beige paper background. The anchors vary in shape, with some having rope wrapped around the shank, a ship's wheel behind one, and others with simple open or solid flukes. The linework is bold and mostly solid, with no shading or colour, arranged in a loose grid across the sheet.

Traditional Anchor Rope Ship wheel Nautical Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrick House had been dead since Tuesday, which meant the stairs, and the stairs gave me fourteen floors to think about the sheet of anchors on my grandad's kitchen wall. He'd brought it home from Rotterdam in his kitbag, a folder of flash some tattooist had drawn for the crew, fourteen anchors in black ink on paper gone the colour of weak tea. He pinned it by the cooker with four drawing pins and said, 'Every one of them holds. Pick the one that holds.' He never told me which one he'd have picked. He just tapped the ones with rope round the shank and said that was the honest kind.

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He went in March, and the sheet came to me with the kettle and his Bible from the Merchant Navy Welfare Board. I kept it folded in my coat. Mrs Okafor on nine had been losing her shopping for a month. Her balcony was ninety degrees from mine, and the bin store had a coil of old mooring rope that Dev from the caretaker's office said nobody wanted. I tied one end round the iron bracket that used to hold a plant pot, made a loop in the other end, and checked it the way Grandad had shown me on the harbour wall when I was seven. Then I lowered it down, a lump of rope with a bent hook through it, and waited.

Her bag came up on the first try, swinging, a tin of evaporated milk and a loaf knocking together inside it. She waved from the rail like I'd won something. I stood there with the rope burning my palms and the whole grey estate spread below me, and I thought, that one holds.