Black ink flash drawing of an anchor with rope, a skull and a cluster of flowers, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor, skull and flowers drawing

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing on paper of an anchor with coiled rope, with a human skull and a cluster of blossoms and leaves set against the upper shank. The linework is bold and sketched, with hatching used for shading on the anchor and skull. The design is in black ink only on white paper, photographed against a dark background.

Traditional Anchor Skull Rope Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gale had taken the foremast by midnight, and by dawn the Mary Ellen Dare was wallowing like a drowned cow off the Pembrokeshire coast with nothing left to steer by but the compass and Cormac's bad temper. Old Hesketh had lashed the bell rope to the anchor shank that morning, swearing it would hold the wreck together better than any prayer. Nobody argued. The anchor was the heaviest thing aboard and the only thing still shining with the oil they'd rubbed into it at Milford.

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The skull came out of the ballast in the afternoon, pale as a boiled egg, with a fistful of hydrangeas tangled round its jaw where the cargo of cuttings had split open in the hold. Cormac wanted it over the side. Hesketh said a man who threw away a good omen deserved the sea he was given. So they wound the rope twice round the shank, bit the blossoms off the stalks, and sat there in the rain tying knots and waiting for a sail.

The sail came on the third day, a brown Dutch fishing boat with a girl at the tiller who looked at the skull, looked at the anchor, and laughed so hard she nearly lost her hat overboard. She towed them into Dale harbour on the evening tide. Hesketh kept the skull on the chart table after that, and every Michaelmas he hung a fresh posy from its teeth and swore it was the only honest navigator he had ever sailed with.