Pencil line drawing of a traditional-style anchor inside a rope border, with a lighthouse and seascape in the upper shank and a scallop shell and flowers at the base.

Anchor, lighthouse and shell design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn outline design of a ship's anchor framed by a rope border. Within the anchor's crossbar and shank, a lighthouse stands on a headland above rolling waves, with clouds and seabirds in the sky, and a scallop shell and two flowers sit at the bottom. The bold, even linework is drawn in dark pencil or ink on pale paper, with no shading or colour.

Traditional Anchor Lighthouse Rope Shell Flower Wave Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog came in off the Minch before supper, thick as wet wool, and by midnight Ada Pryce could not see the lamp she had lit herself. She stood on the gallery with one hand on the cold rail and listened. Somewhere below the headland the Mary Kemp was feeling her way in, and her skipper, Tom Gillies, would be counting the lights he could not see.

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Ada had watched that boat leave at dawn, her chain rattling over the bow like a dropped pan. Tom had told her once that the anchor was the only honest thing on a ship, because it went where it was sent and held what it caught. She had not believed him then. Now the bell buoy off the point gave one flat note, then another, and she counted them against the clock in the lamp room.

At two the fog thinned. A lantern showed low on the water, swinging, and then a hull lifted out of the grey with its anchor hanging from the bow. Tom was on deck with a boathook, shouting that the chain had fouled on the reef and he had cut it free rather than lose the boat and his lad with it. Ada went down the stairs two at a time with the tin kettle still warm in her fist.

Morning showed the anchor on the slipway, crusted with weed. Tangled in one fluke sat a scallop shell, pale and whole, its ribs as neat as a fan. Tom turned it over in his palm for a long time. Then he pressed it into her hand. "Keep that," he said. "Whatever the sea takes, it gives something back if you're looking. Trim the wick tonight, Ada. Somebody has to."