Traditional-style anchor tattoo with a blue bow at the top and the words live free in script, shown in close-up on skin.

Anchor with blue bow and live free script

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A shaded anchor sits at the centre, with a blue ribbon bow tied around the shank and the words live and free in script beneath the flukes. The anchor is rendered in grey with dark outlines and soft shading, while the bow is in blue with light highlights. The tattoo fills the centre of a close, slightly angled photograph against a plain skin background.

Traditional Other Anchor Bow Ribbon Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top came down in Whitstable the week the last elephant was sold, and most of the company were already packing their lives into hatboxes. I stayed on with the rigging because someone had to, and because Mrs Okafor asked me to. She had a spool of blue silk ribbon in her coat pocket and no idea what to do with it, so I took it from her and went looking for the old anchor in the winter barn.

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The anchor had come from a scrapyard at Sheerness for twelve pounds and a bottle of rum, and we hung it from the iron beam over the practice net as the fixed point for the flying trapeze. Dilys, who had been the best catcher the Marlowe Brothers ever employed, said a ship's anchor was the only honest thing in a circus, because it did one job and never pretended otherwise. So I tied the ribbon in a proper bow around the shank, and Pip the clown painted LIVE FREE along the flukes in letters that wandered downhill, because he had never once spelled free the same way twice.

The company was sold up in March. The new owners wanted the barn for storage and the anchor for scrap. I told the man from the yard it was ballast, and he didn't argue, which told me he had heard worse lies. I unhooked the anchor myself, dragged it on a sledge down the shingle to the old pier at low water, and sat with it while the tide turned.

The bow was still tight on the shank when I finally let it go. It went down slow, flukes first, the blue ribbon lifting and settling like something deciding whether to stay. Dilys would have called that showing off. I walked back up the beach with my hands empty and the spare spool still in my pocket, which was the only part of the act I had ever been bad at letting go.