Colour tattoo of a grey anchor with swirled detailing, an orange starfish and teal and blue waves, on the ankle.

Anchor, starfish and waves on an ankle

Neo-trad · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a grey anchor with a rope motif and a cross-shaped top, with a single orange starfish placed across its shank. Swirling wave patterns are etched into the anchor's base, and teal and blue wave lines curl around the design. The linework is dark and bold with soft grey shading, and the colour is mostly confined to the starfish and the waves, set against the skin of the ankle.

Neo-trad Ankle Anchor Cross Starfish Wave Rope Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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Your grandad's anchor has spent forty years propped behind the coal bunker, and I have decided it is coming to the wedding. Don't argue with me the morning of, love. Your Uncle Pete wants it in the skip, and I want it in the harbour car park where Ted proposed, which is the only place it has ever made sense to me.

He found that starfish on the sand at Robin Hood's Bay the summer before we married, a live one, orange as a traffic cone, and he would not let me throw it back until I had said yes. I said yes to the starfish, really. I told him it would die in his pocket. He painted it that colour afterwards with my nail varnish, Rose Petal, because the real ones fade in the sun, and he said a thing that looked that bright deserved to stay bright. The crosspiece came off a broken bollard the council threw out, and he filed the wave swirls into the shank with a bent nail on wet evenings while the telly rattled.

The rope was always coming loose. Every few winters he'd climb the stepladder with a pot of tar and a grin and say a marriage holds if the knot is tight and somebody is willing to climb up and tie it again. I never did learn that knot properly. You will, though. Take the starfish down from the hook and put it in your going-away bag, where you'll feel it when you're tired of being brave. The anchor stays on the wall for Pete, who needs somewhere to hang his coat.

Love always, Gran