Black line flash design of an anchor with a small heart at its base, with the script words 'A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor.' written above and below it.

Anchor with heart and sailor quote

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a ship's anchor with a ring at the top and a small heart shape at the base of the shank. Script lettering reads 'A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor.', with the first line above the anchor and the second line below it. The design uses solid black ink on a white background with no shading or colour, and the anchor is centred with the text framing it.

Lettering Anchor Heart Script Quote Sailor Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band had packed up their last waltz by the time Walter Jessop came off the evening boat, salt crusted in his eyebrows and his cap in his fist. I was still stacking chairs in the pier-end dance hall at Fleetwick, and I told him the doors had shut. He said the doors had been shut on him before and he'd managed. Then he asked if the floor was still sprung, because he had a notion to test it.

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We danced anyway, to the wireless behind the bar, a slow foxtrot that crackled every eight bars. He held me the way a man holds a rope he doesn't trust. He told me the crossing had been glass the whole week, not a ripple, and how bored he'd gone, and how the skipper had started sanding the deck for something to do. My mother used to say a smooth sea never made a skilful sailor, and I said so. Walter laughed and said she'd have made a fine skipper herself.

He had a brass pin on his lapel shaped like an anchor, a ring at the top and a little heart set into the shank where the flukes met. His sister had it made in Liverpool, he said, and he'd never once taken it off. When the wireless gave out he left at midnight. Three days later the Gull was caught in a squall, the sea coming up like a fist, and Walter brought her in with a torn sail and nobody lost.

The following Saturday there was a brass pin on the bar counter, unclaimed, with a note folded under it in pencil: Come and test the floor. I still keep it in the tin with the ticket stubs. The heart is worn flat from my thumb.