Back of a woman's neck with a small blue-grey anchor tattoo wrapped in rope, and a colourful tattoo visible on her shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor tattoo on the back of the neck

Neck · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a woman's neck and upper back, with dark hair pulled aside. A small anchor with a coiled rope is tattooed centrally at the nape, drawn in dark blue-grey ink with soft shading. A partly visible colourful tattoo sits on the shoulder at the left edge of the frame.

Neck Back Anchor Rope

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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 rope had been soaking in the harbour for three days when Alf Penhallow hauled it up the slipway and decided it would hold. Nobody in Porthkennack believed him. The Mary Jane had dragged her anchor in the February gale, and the chain had gone down with her, but the old hemp warp had parted at the shackle and fetched up in the weed by the breakwater, and Alf had been stubborn about it ever since.

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His father had told him that a rope is only as honest as the knot you give it. So Alf sat on an upturned crab pot with his hands cracked from the cold and worked the coil, feeling along its length for the places where the strands had gone soft. Gulls came down to watch him. The tide turned twice while he was at it, and the boy from the chandlery brought him a flask of tea that he never drank.

When he finally rowed out at dawn, the grey water was flat as a plate and the cloud sat low over the headland. He dropped the anchor where his grandmother always had, over the sand, and paid out the rope slowly, hand over hand, counting fathoms the way she had taught him with a thumb on each knuckle. At eleven fathoms it bit. The line sang once and went still.

Back on the slipway that evening the boy was chalking a small anchor on the wall beside the winch, the rope curling round its shank like a question. Alf watched him finish the loop, then went home and wrote his own initials beneath it, in case the sea forgot who had tied the knot.