Traditional style tattoo of a black anchor with red and orange accents and a banner reading FOREVER WITH ME, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with Forever With Me banner on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A traditional style anchor sits at the centre, with a cream banner across its shank reading FOREVER WITH ME in bold black lettering. The anchor has solid black shading, bold outlines, and red, orange and grey highlights on the flukes and banner ends. The design is centred and filled to the edges of the frame on a calf.

Traditional Calf Anchor Banner Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor went over the side of the Marigold in February, the week the Thames came up brown and fast past Teddington. I had meant to check the bowline and had not, and Ada Penrose stood on the cabin roof with her hands jammed in her coat and said nothing at all, which from Ada is worse than shouting. We watched forty feet of chain run out through the hawse and vanish into the water like a sentence nobody wanted to finish.

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Without its anchor a barge in flood is a wardrobe on a wave, and we learned that clinging to a mooring ring below Kingston while the stern swung out into the stream. The anchor had been the only thing aboard older than me. Dad had it re-tarred the summer before he died, and he had the ribbon painted across the shank too, though he never admitted the words were meant for my mother, who left him for a man with a motorboat and a sensible haircut. Ada read the banner aloud in the cold, FOREVER WITH ME, and remarked that for a liar your father was a poor hand at sentiment.

A week later a lad from the boatyard at Brentford dragged the anchor up with a grapple, black with silt, the cream ribbon still readable under a beard of weed. He wouldn't take money, so Ada made him stand in the cabin while she poured tea into the chipped mugs and cut him a slice of the lemon drizzle she'd been saving for Sunday. We bolted the anchor back on the bow that afternoon. Before the light went Ada took a red paint pot from the locker and added a line beneath in her neat capitals: AND DON'T TRUST THE BOWLINE. I stood on the towpath and watched the letters drip in the last of the sun, and for once I had nothing clever to say.