Traditional style anchor tattoo with red flowers and a rope wrapped around the shank, placed on the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with flowers and rope on an ankle

Traditional · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A grey anchor with a looped top and a rope coiled around its shank is decorated with two red flowers with yellow centres. The anchor has bold black outlines, flat grey shading and a red fluke tip, with the red and yellow accents giving the piece a classic look. It sits on the side of a bare foot against a plain background.

Traditional Ankle Anchor Rope Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Porthallow believed the Mary Ellen had gone down with all hands, least of all Tobias Penrose, who had bought her anchor off a scrap man in Falmouth for the price of a bad dinner. He kept it chained to the wall of the chandlery yard where the gulls couldn't reach it, and every Sunday he scrubbed the grey from its shank with vinegar and a horsehair brush, the way his father had taught him to keep a thing honest.

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The rope was Mrs Hosken's work. She had laid it up on her kitchen floor from her late husband's hemp, three strands tight enough to sing when plucked, and wound it round the shank with a fisherman's knot nobody else in the village could tie. The poppies she tucked in at the crown, red as the clay on the cliff path, with yellow hearts she pricked out with a darning needle. She said a ship's anchor ought to have something growing on it, or it forgot it was meant to hold on.

In March a storm came up the bay faster than the lifeboat could launch, and Jory Coad, who had sworn he'd never set foot on a boat again, walked out along the harbour wall at dawn with a coil of line over his shoulder. Tobias went after him because somebody had to. The sea was grey and white and taking everything it could reach. At the end of the wall they found a small boat dragging its anchor towards the rocks, and Jory threw the line before anyone told him to.

When the boat was safe in, Mrs Hosken came down the slipway with a flask of tea and looked at the empty chain on the chandlery wall. She touched one of the red poppies on the iron, then the wet paint on the fluke tips, and said nothing at all. Tobias understood then that she had been up all night, mending what the weather had worn.