Black and grey line drawing of a traditional-style anchor wrapped in ribbon banners, one reading FAMILY, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with family ribbon banners

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of an anchor with a cross-bar, shank and curved flukes, wrapped by ribbon banners. The top banner reads FAMILY, and the other ribbons carry short initials, with a bold ribbon tied at the base. The bold outlines, solid black fills and hatched shading give it a traditional, stencil-ready look on a plain white background.

Traditional Anchor Ribbon Banner Family Initial Rope

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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

You reach Pell's Boarding House on the last bus of October, the rent book wedged under your arm and the wind coming straight off the harbour wall. Mrs Harrow opens the door before you knock, as if she has been watching the hill road since dinner. She takes your coat without asking, hangs it beside an oilskin that still smells of diesel, and tells you breakfast is at seven and the hot water runs out at ten.

Keep reading

On the landing hangs a sampler in a dull oak frame. Someone stitched an anchor in black thread years ago, the shank bent where the cloth pulled, with FAMILY across the crossbar. Beneath it, ribbon-shaped scraps of linen carry initials: TDB twice, with Roman numerals, then PMG and NLB, and at the base a set of letters so faint you have to tilt your head to read them. You ask who they were. She says the men the Maud took in the gale of 1911, and the one who came back, who still sleeps in the box room at the top of the stairs and comes down for porridge at half six.

The horn sounds at midnight, two long notes from the slip. You hear the front door and the clink of the lamp hook, and by the time you pull on a jumper she is already on the shingle with a coil of rope over one shoulder. The boat comes in low on the swell with a single man at the tiller, and she catches the bow line on the second throw and makes it fast with a knot her hands know without looking. Neither of you speaks. The water sucks at the stones, and then, slowly, the boat stops moving.

In the morning the sampler is still on the wall, but a fresh strip of bare linen is pinned beneath the others. Mrs Harrow sets a needle and a spool of black thread on the hall table beside your tea. 'Blank ones are for whoever stays,' she says, and goes back to the kitchen before you can answer, leaving you to decide whether three weeks is long enough to earn a name.