Black traditional-style flash design of an anchor, a heart with a MIDWEST banner and two roses, printed on a coral t-shirt.

Anchor, heart and roses design on a t-shirt

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A flat, black-ink illustration of an anchor with rope, a heart with a banner reading MIDWEST, and two roses, printed on a coral t-shirt. The linework is bold and solid with simple fills and no shading, typical of old-school tattoo flash. The design is centred on a plain garment against a white background.

Traditional Anchor Heart Rose Banner Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been splicing rope since the morning the cage at Wheal Esther dropped with two men in it, and by spring she could make an eye splice blindfold, which her mother said no respectable girl ought to know. The yard sat at the bottom of the harbour road, where the tide slid under the pilchard cellars and the smell of tar hung over everything. Her father had been a shaftman until his chest gave out. Now he sat on an upturned bucket and called out the lay of each strand, as if the rope might otherwise forget it.

Keep reading

The parcel came up from Hayle on a Thursday, addressed in pencil to Captain E. Vosper, care of the Lamorna Arms. Inside was a sheet torn from a flash book, the kind the sailors pinned up in the harbour barber's, and on it a heart pierced by an anchor, roses crowding one side, and a banner across the middle lettered in heavy capitals. MIDWEST, it said. Nobody in Porthkerris knew a place called that. Her father squinted and said it was somewhere in America where the ships sailed inland, which made no sense to either of them.

Vosper had come in last winter on a schooner with a split mainsail and had never gone out again. He owed the yard eleven pounds. Nell read the note twice, folded the flash into her apron, and went down to the slip where his skiff was pulled up, its name half painted out.

She took a length of new hemp, sat on the stones, and worked the splice as slowly as she could until the tide reached her boots. When she finished, the eye sat tight and clean, and she knotted it to the transom ring without quite deciding why. Then she climbed back up the hill, left the bill unpaid, and let the rope hang where anyone walking the quay could see it.