Black and grey traditional style tattoo on an upper arm showing an anchor, a skull, a ribbon banner with lettering and five-pointed stars.

Anchor, skull and stars on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows an anchor with a ring at the top, a skull, a ribbon banner with lettering and a looped outline, and several five-pointed stars below. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth and grey, with solid black areas in the stars. The photo has a warm sepia tint, and the tattoo fills most of the frame against a pale background.

Traditional Upper arm Anchor Skull Banner Lettering Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The relief boat was two days late and the lamp had started to smoke at the wick. I trimmed it by feel, the way my father taught me on Skerry Gull, while the tide slapped the landing steps below and paraffin fumes rose through the iron floor. Out past the Carrick ledge, somewhere in that pewter water, Jimmy Vane would be tacking home with a hold full of stores and his usual cussing, if he had any sense left.

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He had left a note under the coffee tin on the last supply run. Back by the new moon, Ned. Keep the stars on the chart. He meant the old chart pinned above the table, the one where he had inked five-pointed stars along the margin, each one a bearing he swore by when fog swallowed the light. Nobody else in the service trusted them. I trusted them because Jimmy had never once been wrong about a tide.

Fog came in at dusk, thick as wet wool, and the foghorn started its long moaning complaint. I stood at the rail with one hand on the cold brass and counted the seconds between the lamp's sweeps. Then a shape loomed off the starboard bow, a rope came snaking up through the murk, and there he was, grinning, with a sea anchor dragging astern like a debt he had decided to keep.

He hung that anchor ring on the hook by the door before he climbed the stairs, the way he always did. It swung there in the draught from the open hatch, catching the lamplight each time it turned, and I left it where it was.