Black and grey hand-lettered tattoo flash design of an anchor with rope and the words If my love were an ocean, there would be no more land, drawn on a sketchbook page, with no body part shown.

Anchor with hand-lettered quote design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing on a spiral sketchbook page shows an anchor wrapped in rope, with the phrase "If my love were an ocean, there would be no more land" lettered across a banner, the anchor and the word Ocean. The lettering uses bold outlines, script and block letterforms, and the anchor and banner are shaded with fine dots and hatching. The drawing is in black ink on white paper, with a few marker pens and a pencil lying beside it on a dark grid mat.

Lettering Dotwork Anchor Rope Lettering Ocean Banner Quote Script

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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 have the kettle on before the frost has left the yard, and the hens are still shut in, complaining. Your brother's boots are by the door where he left them the night the lorry didn't come back up the lane. Nobody says his name at breakfast now. You just set out two mugs and then put one away again.

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The cattle need breaking up the ice on the trough, so you take the long-handled axe down from its nails and walk the field edge in the grey light. The dyke is white with rime. Somewhere past the far hedge the river is loud under its skin of ice, and you can hear it working at the stones the way water does when it has been told to keep still and won't. Your grandmother used to say the flood-meadow was the sea's back garden. She said it the year the rope from the old boat hung in the barn, coiled and stiff, with a tarred anchor the size of a child's coffin propped against the wall beside it.

You find the anchor in the back of the barn under a fleece of sacking, where you knew it would be. The flukes are rusted to lace. You turn it over and rub the shank with your thumb until a line of black shows through, the old words your uncle had scratched there with a nail, half gone now. You cannot read them in this light, so you carry it out into the open and hold it up to the sky.

The ice breaks under the axe with a sound like a plate dropped in another room. The cattle come lumbering down to drink, steaming. You stand at the trough with the anchor across your shoulder and find you are laughing, quietly, at nothing, at a man who wrote a love song as if the land were a thing you could swim across. Then you go back to the house to fetch your brother's boots.