Black blackwork tattoo of a white anchor knocked out of a dark ink splash with drips, on the forearm of a person in jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor in black ink splatter on forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large anchor is shown in negative space, with its pale outline and cross-shaped detail cut out of a solid black ink blot. Loose black splatter dots and paint-like drips spread up and down from the central shape. The image is black ink on skin, with no colour, and the tattoo fills most of the frame against a tiled background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mags, the ink on the chart room bulkhead has finally dried, so you can stop worrying I'll be seasick in the paint. Bosun Fairley said the anchor was a bad omen on a ship that never drops hook, but the captain liked the splash of it and signed the chit before breakfast. We have been running the Bay of Biscay for nine days now, and the sea is the colour of wet slate, so I have been hunting for something to look at that isn't grey.

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The squall came on Tuesday. We lost the spritsail boom and Mr Pell went over the rail for an hour with a lifeline, and when they hauled him back he kept saying the water had tasted of ink. I laughed at him. I still laugh, but less now. Fairley got the spare anchor shackled in the forward hold and swore the thing had been waiting in the dark for us since the dockyard in Plymouth, cross-marked and smug as a parson.

I have kept the bit of stencil card you sent with the pears. I cut a cross from it and used it to rub a smudge of tar onto my wrist, the way Pell's brother did in the Crimea, so that I could say I had something from home on me. Tell Dad the little splashes are for the bits of you I keep dropping, and the big black shape is the part that holds. Write back to the Lowestoft post office. I will be there in March, God and the Admiralty willing, and I will show you the mark without my sleeve rolled down.

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