Black and grey stippled dotwork design of an anchor wrapped in a rope and a banner reading I Refuse To Sink, shown as a drawing with no body placement visible.

Anchor with I Refuse To Sink banner

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A drawing of an anchor with a rope coiled around its shank and a ribbon banner wrapped across it. The banner reads I Refuse To Sink in hand-drawn lettering. The shading is built from fine stipple dots in black and grey, with the rope and anchor flukes rendered in dense dotwork for depth.

Dotwork Traditional Anchor Banner Rope Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The harbourmaster's wife swore the Mary Ellen had gone down with all hands in the February gale of 1911, and the village had mourned her for a year before the boat came limping round the breakwater on a Tuesday, her mainsail in rags and her skipper, Tom Garrow, sitting on the cabin step as if he had only stepped ashore for a pint.

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He would not say much at first. He drank his tea at the Lantern Inn with both hands around the cup, and when Sarah Pook asked him how he had lived through it, he only shook his head and pointed at the anchor lying across the flagstones of the quay where he had dropped it. It was a great black thing, pitted with salt, and someone had wound a length of old hemp round its shank as a kindness, the way you bind a splint.

"Ask me in the spring," he said. "I'll tell you then what the sea said to me."

But in the spring he was gone again, and the wind that took him was the same one that had brought him home. Sarah found the note pinned to the Lantern's door in April, written in pencil on the back of a tide table. It said only that the anchor was for whoever came next, and that they were to mind the rope, because it had held when nothing else would, and that it did not want thanking.

She took it down to the water that evening and hung it on the sea wall, where the tide reached it twice a day. By the summer the hemp had gone grey and soft, and the children of the town had started calling it the stubborn one.