Black line drawing of an anchor entwined with an infinity loop, with the script words hope and life, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Anchor with infinity loop and hope and life script

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing shows an anchor with a small ring at the top and a heart cut into its base, joined to an infinity loop. The words hope and life are written in cursive script, one in the upper loop and one in the lower. The design uses clean, even single-weight strokes in solid black on a plain white background with no shading.

Fine line Lettering Anchor Infinity Hope Life Script Heart

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

You learn the lift at Harbour House by its noises before you learn its numbers. Ninth floor, the doors open with a sigh, and the corridor smells of someone's Sunday roast. Your nan's brass anchor hangs on the wall of flat 914, the one she carried back from Gravesend, and it is the only thing you insist on taking when the council moves you out in March. The man from the housing office says the new place looks over the car park. You say that will do.

Keep reading

Ray from 911 carries the box down the stairs because the lift has broken again. On the landing he tells you about his boat, a flat-bottomed thing he kept at Lowestoft until the marina sold the berths. 'You don't keep an anchor for the sea,' he says, 'you keep it for the moment the sea stops pushing.' You don't answer. The banister is cold under your hand, and somewhere below a child is banging a saucepan lid like a gong.

In the new flat the anchor doesn't sit against the wall the way it used to. You hang it on a nail above the bath anyway, and in the steam the small ring at its top catches the light, round as a full stop. Your nan used to say the loop on the anchor was for the things you couldn't lose: hope first, then the living that follows it, going round and round without ever reaching the end of the line.

On the first night you wake to the hum of the new fridge and reach for the wall out of habit, as if the building might roll. It doesn't. You lie still and let it stay still, and that is the nearest thing to hope you have managed in a year.