Pencil and watercolour drawing of an anchor wrapped in rope, with a small bird perched on the crossbar and pink peonies and roses, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Anchor with bird and peonies design

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A drawing of an anchor with a coiled rope wrapped around its shaft, a small songbird perched on the crossbar, and pink roses and peonies with a teal gemstone set in the anchor's curve. The linework is soft pencil with shading on the metal and bird, while the flowers are rendered in muted watercolour washes. The design is centred on a plain white background with no body part shown.

Botanical Realism Anchor Rope Bird Songbird Rose Peony Flower Gemstone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sparrow came aboard at Scalloway with the last of the ebb, and Iver Lund swore it was the same bird that had ridden out the February gales on our forestay. I did not believe him. Nobody on the Margaret Ellen believed much of what Iver said after the second bottle, but he was right about birds more often than he was right about weather.

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The anchor was his grandfather's, a plain iron thing with the shank worn pale where the cable had run through the hawse for forty years. Every spring Iver had the rope re-laid, and every spring the peonies appeared on the foredeck, pressed flat between sheets of old chart paper. They came from a widow's garden in Lerwick. She had bound a teal sliver of sea glass in wire and said it would bring the boat home if somebody remembered to thank the water for it.

We were forty miles out when the engine coughed and died, and for a long afternoon nobody spoke. Iver sat on the hatch with his hands on his knees. The sparrow hopped along the crossbar, unbothered, picking at a loose strand of rope. I thought of the widow's kitchen, the kettle on the hob, the way she had never once asked whether we would come back for the washing.

When the wind finally came round from the north, Iver stood, rubbed the glass with his thumb and said, "Let go." The anchor went down through green water with a sound like a dropped bell, the rope singing through the hawse. The bird lifted off the crossbar and circled the mast twice before it made for land. I have never known whether it was thanking us or simply leaving, and I have stopped minding which.