Small colour anchor tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist, outlined in dark blue with yellow, red and green accents in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor tattoo on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm and wrist, with the arm extended toward the camera and a blurred background. The centre of the frame shows an anchor with a dark outline, filled with blue, yellow and green shading and small red details. The tattoo is sharp against the skin, and the soft focus of the background keeps attention on the design.

Traditional Forearm Anchor

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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

Sit down by the vending machine, love, where the light doesn't reach, and I'll give you the rest while the monitors make up their minds. The anchor belonged to the Marguerite Lane, a collier that went down off Holyhead in February 1951 with four men aboard and a hold full of enamel basins. Her cook, Dafydd Pryce, could not swim, and he is the only reason the story got told at all.

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Dafydd came ashore clinging to a spar and walked into the Seaman's Mission with the anchor's old shackle still wound in his fist. Nobody believed a cook had saved a chain, so he set about proving it. That spring he painted the anchor himself in the back of a chandler's shop: blue for the deep water, yellow for the lamp they'd lost, green for the weed on the hull, and a dab of red for the rope burn that never came off his palm. He had it inked onto his forearm by a man in Bangor who charged him a pint and a promise, and he wore it until the day he died, which was the only thing he was ever vain about.

When the scrap man came round the ward last month offering a shilling for the old chain I'd kept in my locker, I told him it was spoken for. My mam had it from Dafydd's widow, and the widow had it from nobody, which is how these things go. So I'm handing it to you now, the way it was handed to me.

Now go and fetch the sister a tea, and tell her Cormac says the anchor holds.