Monoline drawing of an anchor with the word faith written down its shank, in brown ink on aged parchment, shown as a tattoo design.

Anchor with faith lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A simple outline drawing of an anchor with a ring at the top and curved flukes at the base. The word faith is written in lowercase script running vertically through the shank, and the lines are uniform and unshaded. The brown ink sits on a textured, sepia-toned parchment background with a visible crease along the lower left.

Lettering Fine line Anchor Faith Script

Find an artist for this

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

Nobody on the Mary Ann Tolley had ever seen Cyrus Ambler hold a pen, so when the purser found a letter folded inside the spare anchor's locker, the crew assumed it was a bill of lading. It was not. It was a single sheet, brown with tea, and across its middle ran one word in a hand as careful as a mapmaker's: faith.

Keep reading

Cyrus had signed on at Hull with a bad leg and a worse temper. Through the autumn gales off the Dogger Bank he sat on the windlass with a stub of ink and a cup of cold coffee, drawing the anchor that had already dragged them twice. The ring he made round as a coin. The flukes he curved like a gull's wings. Mr Dunnage, the mate, thought it was foolishness. Cyrus told him a man could hold a rope and still need something to hold him.

When the Tolley struck the sandbar at Spurn Point in February, the spare anchor went over the side with the word still wet on the paper. They found the sheet a week later, pinned under a cracked oilskin, its lower corner worn soft where a thumb had folded it again and again. Beneath the word, in pencil, he had written a single line: Drop it where the light can see you. Nobody knew whether he meant the anchor or himself, and the purser, folding the letter back into its square, decided it made no difference which.