Black and grey line drawing of an anchor wrapped in rope, with headphones, a microphone and audio cables hanging from it, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Anchor with headphones and microphone

Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of an old wooden anchor wrapped in rope, with a pair of over-ear headphones hanging from the crossbar and a handheld microphone and audio cables draped over the shank. The shading uses dense engraved hatching for the wood and rope, with clean outlines and high contrast against the white background. The design is centred and fills the frame, with no body part visible.

Anchor Rope Microphone Wood

Find an artist for this

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

Old Harrow Tench had kept the anchor in the net store for thirty years, and nobody on Skerry Quay could say why he had bought it from a breaker's yard in Hull. It was too heavy for any boat still working and too old for anything but hanging on a wall. Then the winter his grandson Ansel came home from the city with a box of wires and a pair of headphones the size of soup bowls, the old man asked him to rig the thing on the crossbar so the boats would have something to listen to.

Keep reading

The lad ran the cable down the shank and out along the flukes to a wireless set in the hut, and he sang nothing himself. He played records of the Dorset men singing the old capstan songs, low and rough, and the sound went out across the black water. Captains said they could hear it over their engines. Tench said the anchor had been dragging in the mud for years, and it was only right it should sing a little before it settled.

In March the Nelly Rose went out into a squall and did not come back on the tide. Ansel sat by the set for two nights with the volume up. On the third morning the speaker crackled, and a voice came through thin and wet, singing the chorus of a shanty the lad knew because his grandfather had sung it every Sunday of his life. Ansel pulled the headphones on and did not take them off. Tench went down to the slipway with a coil of rope over his shoulder and waited for the tide to bring them in.