Shaded grey anchor tattoo with green leaves wrapped around the shank, on the calf.

Anchor with green leaves on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A grey anchor with a ring at the top and curled flukes is shaded with black and grey tones to give it depth. Green leaves wind diagonally across the shank and the top of the anchor, with lighter highlights on the foliage. The tattoo sits on the lower leg, centred in the frame against a dark background.

Traditional Calf Anchor Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and keep your hands off the gin till I've finished. It's cold on the quay tonight and the gulls have gone to bed. This is about the anchor that came up in Tom Pellow's net the winter the river froze black at the edges, when nobody in Saltney Reach would row out past the lamp.

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Pellow was a mudlark's son, and he was not a man to leave a thing lying. He hauled that anchor over the gunwale, dripping and furred with weed, and the green had got into the crown of it like hair into a comb. Old Mags at the chandlery swore it belonged to the Corisande, lost with all hands off the Pill twelve years before, and that its leaves would grow back wherever you cut them. Pellow laughed at her. Then he went home and found the leaves had already crept along his bench.

He tried to scrape them off with a wire brush, but they only wound tighter, climbing the shank the way ivy climbs a drainpipe, green and patient, and wherever they touched the iron it went grey and cold. He carried it to the pawnbroker, to the bell tower, to the sea wall at low tide. Nobody would take it. In the end he rowed it out past the lamp himself and dropped it in the deep channel, and when he came back up the steps the leaves were waiting on his doorstep, wet with harbour water, asking to come in.

So he kept it. On the nights the river runs high you can still see the green winding up the iron where Mags hung it over her door. If you ask Pellow why he never went back to sea, he'll tell you the anchor was never the thing that was lost.