Hand-drawn black ink design of an anchor with the words I refuse to sink curving around it in a loop, sketched on textured paper.

Anchor with I refuse to sink lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a hand-drawn anchor on the left, with its shaft and flukes shaded by dense diagonal hatching. The words I refuse to sink in a casual handwritten script run to the right and curve into an open loop that wraps around the anchor. It is drawn in black ink on a pale, textured paper background, with the design centred and filling most of the frame.

Lettering Anchor Text Quote Loop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had the anchor drawn on the back of a bill from the chandler's, because that was the paper to hand when Mr Pryce from the harbour office came up the lane to say the boat would have to come out of the water by Friday or he would have it hauled himself. She wasn't having that. Her father had bought the Mary Ellen with the last of his redundancy money and had never once in thirty years let her see the bottom of her without a bucket going. So she sat at the kitchen table with a biro and drew the thing the way he used to scratch it into the wheelhouse door, hatching the shank till her wrist ached.

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The words came after, because the anchor looked lonely on its own. She wrote them in the hand her mother had taught her for birthday cards, loose and a bit leaning, and then she ran the last curl round the anchor's ring so it looped back on itself like a line paid out to a buoy. Pryce looked at it on the step and said it was hardly a plan for a seaworthy vessel. She said it wasn't a plan, it was a promise, and he laughed, which she had not expected.

Friday came and the Mary Ellen stayed in her mooring. Pryce sent a man to sound the hull and he came back muddy to the knee, saying she was tight as a drum underneath. Ruth folded the chandler's bill into her coat and carried it down to the slip every morning after that, just to check the water was still where she had left it.