Black and grey ink drawing of a ship's anchor wrapped in rope, with two crossed hatchet axes behind it, on a pale parchment-style background.

Anchor with crossed axes and rope

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pen-and-ink drawing of a ship's anchor with a wooden stock wrapped in rope, overlaid with two crossed hatchet axes whose handles pass behind the anchor shank. The linework is fine and crosshatched, with shading on the wood grain, metal ring and axe heads. The image is monochrome on a mottled beige background, which sits behind the design.

Traditional Anchor Axe Rope Nautical Ship

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They say the anchor came up the shaft at Lowmere in the wet spring the Dunn seam broke into the old harbour cellar, hooked to a rope that nobody had tied to any ship. Old Ned Carrick found it sitting in three fathoms of black water, and he sent word up by the bell. The men hauled, and the stock came out first, wrapped in tarred hemp as thick as a man's wrist.

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The men wanted the anchor kept at the pit head as a mark of luck. The pit captain said it was salvage and belonged to the owners in Hull. For two nights the argument ran in the Wheatsheaf, until a boy named Tom Rigg, who had carried tea to the banksmen since he was nine, said the rope had not frayed. It had been cut, and the cut was square, like an axe. Nobody believed him until the hatchets went missing from the stores.

On the third morning the two hatchets were found lying on the hanging wall of the lower level, their handles crossed over the anchor as though someone had laid them there to keep it still. Carrick swore he had seen the old harbour men lash it down before the sea came in, and that they had gone under singing. The captain had the anchor raised to the chapel roof, and nobody argued after that.

Tom still carries tea to the banksmen. When the shaft creaks he touches the rope at his neck and says the anchor is holding, and the water in the lower level has never risen past the mark where the hatchets were laid.