Black and grey pen drawing of an anchor tattoo design built from a ship, two swallows, a butterfly, roses, a compass and small lettering, in a fine line style.

Anchor tattoo design made of small icons

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black pen drawing of an anchor composed of small motifs, including a sailing ship at the crossbar, a compass, roses, a heart, a butterfly at the base and two swallows at the ends of the arms. Words and short phrases are scattered through the design, and the linework is fine and sketchy. The drawing is in black ink on a plain white background, with the anchor centred and filling most of the frame.

Fine line Anchor Ship Swallow Butterfly Rose Compass Heart Coffee cup Lettering

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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 lamp at Skerrow Point had been unlit for three nights when Mairi Dunlop found the notebook wedged behind the oil cans. Its pages were full of drawings: a compass with a star on its face, a ship running before a wind, two swallows with their wings swept back like knives. Someone had sketched the whole thing as an anchor, every small motif placed with care along the shank and arms, and across the top, in a looping hand, the words she had heard her father say a hundred times when the fog came in.

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She took the notebook down to the keeper's kitchen and set it beside the kettle. Her brother Callum came in soaking from the stair, shaking water from his cap, and stopped when he saw what she was holding. He knew the hand. It was their grandmother's, the same one that had written the lighthouse log for forty years before the Board took it away from her.

"She never said she drew," Callum said.

"She never said a lot of things." Mairi turned the page to the butterfly at the base of the anchor, its wings pricked with tiny stars, and beside it a cup of coffee with a curl of steam drawn so thin it almost vanished. Underneath, in pencil that had nearly rubbed away, someone had written: Hi, tell him the tea's on.

Callum laughed, and the sound surprised them both. Outside, far down the channel, a ship's bell rang once, then again, and the new lamp swung its beam across the water as if it had only been waiting to be asked.