Black ink drawing of an anchor with a rope wrapped around it and a tree growing up through the shank, shown as a tattoo design in a sketchbook.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with a tree growing through it

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing of a ship's anchor with a tree growing up through its shank. Coiled rope wraps around the trunk and anchor, and the branches carry clusters of detailed leaves. The linework is crisp and the shading uses fine cross-hatching and stippling in black ink on cream paper, with no colour.

Botanical Anchor Tree Rope Leaves Branches

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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

Mother Ines says the anchor was the first thing the drowned cities gave back, and that it was already growing when the tide went out for the last time. Bring the lamp closer, you lot, because this is the part the children always talk through. The old harbour at Mersey Gap had been sunk for three generations, and the men who dived it said the iron was too heavy to lift and too stubborn to rust through. So nobody lifted it. They built the first hut on its flukes and waited for something to happen.

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What happened was a sapling, pushed up through the shank from a seed that had come in on a bird's feet, or so the ferrymen say. Nobody planted it. It grew straight up through the hole where the iron ring used to be, and every spring it split the ring a little wider. The rope that had once hauled the anchor down was still knotted round the trunk, gone stiff as wire. Old Tobias wanted to cut it free. His daughter Maren would not let him. She said the knot was the only thing holding the tree upright, and a tree that stands up in a flood is worth more than a boat that sinks in one.

So the rope stayed, and the branches went up, and the leaves came out in the shape of little lanterns the colour of a bruise. The year the big storm came off the water and took every mast in the Gap, the anchor held. The tree held it. When the village crawled out to count its losses, they found the iron still sitting on the seabed, with a green crown standing over it like a question nobody had thought to ask. Maren is buried beneath those branches now. Mind the lamp on the way out, and don't look at the roots too hard.