Close side view of a woman in a black bikini showing a grey anchor tattoo on her left side ribs, in a traditional style.

Anchor tattoo on the side ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the side of a torso in a black bikini top, with a single anchor tattoo on the ribcage below the bust. The anchor has a solid outline, a vertical shank with a ring at the top, and curved flukes, shaded in black and grey. The image is a casual phone photo with warm skin tones, a soft background of a room and a plain composition focused on the tattoo.

Traditional Ribs 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

You want to know why the Mary Ellen never went below Gravesend again, and I'll tell you, but you'll have to fetch the kettle first, because my hands won't hold a cup and a story at once. There. Now listen. Her skipper was a man called Tobias Crane, a Thames man with forearms like hawsers, and he had an anchor on him, black and grey, sat just under his ribs where the wind couldn't get at it. He'd had it done in Wapping in a room that smelled of meths and wet dog, and he never once let anybody see it when he was working the lock gates. Modesty, he called it. I called it a man who knew his own pride was a bit of a weight.

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The trouble started with a ring. A brass ring, worn to a shine, that he'd been given by a woman in Rochester who did not, in the end, want to be married to a bargeman. He threw it off the stern at dusk, the way a fool does, and the river took it, and the anchor on his side seemed to pull harder after that. Every tide he'd rub the place where the ink was, the way you'd check a bruise, and say the cargo was heavy when it wasn't.

One November the Mary Ellen dragged her anchor in the Medway fog and fetched up against the Chatham piles. Crane went over the side to free the chain with the water at his chest, and when they hauled him out he was grey and laughing and holding the brass ring in his fist, dredged up from the silt where it had sunk. He never said how it came to be in his hand. I think the river owed him a joke and paid it back.

He kept the ring on a string after that, round his neck, and he never took the anchor off his side. Said it was the only thing on him that had never once let him drift.