Neo-trad anchor tattoo with red, black and grey blocks and dotwork shading on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor on the back of a hand

Neo-trad · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey anchor sits across the back of a hand, with its shank and crossbar outlined in bold black linework. Behind it, angular red and grey blocks create a graphic background, and stippled dotwork shading adds texture to the anchor's flukes. The plain dark backdrop keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Neo-trad Dotwork Hand Anchor

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, the old stair's wet, and leave that lamp alone, it's the last one in Greywater still drawing power. Now, where was I? Ah yes. Ysolde Vane, the harbour master's girl, who went down to the quay the morning the tide forgot to come back.

Keep reading

By then the sea had gone to a grey skin over the sunken wharves, and the ships hung on the air on cables rusted to the colour of old blood. Ysolde kept one thing that had never been lost, her grandmother's anchor, black iron hauled up from the breakwater with a winch and a prayer. She painted the warehouse walls with signal flags, red blocks split by bands of pale ash, so any boat still searching would know a harbour was left. Nobody came. The dust drifted in over everything and settled on her boots like sieved salt.

Then one morning a survey drone came low over the mudflats, humming, asking for a fixed point to measure how far the water had run away. Ysolde walked out with the anchor on her shoulder. She set its flukes into the cracked clay and stippled the shank with small dots, one at a time, the way her grandmother had taught her, so the iron would not slip. The drone circled, took its reading, and blinked green.

Three days later the tide turned. It came back slow and brown, found the anchor waiting, and the first ship in forty years tied its line to the iron and rode quietly into the old red light.