Pencil drawing of a traditional-style tattoo design showing an anchor wrapped in rope, a swallow and two skulls, with no body placement visible.

Anchor, swallow and skulls tattoo design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a tattoo design centred on a vertical anchor with a wooden crossbar, wrapped in rope. Two skulls sit at the crossbar and the base of the anchor, and a swallow with spread wings is set across the shank. The linework is clean and the shading is soft grey, with the rope and feathers rendered in fine hatching on a plain pale background.

Traditional Anchor Skull Swallow Rope Bird

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

The swallows had gone a fortnight before, but Dilys still found their mud cups under the barn eaves when she climbed the ladder for the last of the Discovery apples. She counted them the way her father used to count crates on the Ramsgate quay, one, two, three, each one a crossing that had made it home. The orchard smelled of cut grass and split fruit, and the wasps were already drunk in the windfalls.

Keep reading

The rope swing hung from the oldest tree, a length of tarred manila her father had cut from a trawler's hawser the winter she was born. Its seat was a plank with an iron ring at one end, and where the rope met the bough he had tied a knot that nobody else in the family could untie. Her brother Tomas wanted it taken down. The fibres had gone grey and furry, and he had found a piece of it on the path, snapped clean.

She didn't argue. She climbed the tree in her boots, cut the frayed length above the knot, and sat on the plank with the spare rope in her lap. Then she pushed off and let the orchard tip past her, the bough creaking, the sky swinging in and out of the leaves. At the top of the arc a swallow dropped out of the blue and landed on the plank beside her hand, folded its wings, and looked at her as if she were a late arrival who had missed the tide. She sat very still until it flew.