Colour flash design of a steel anchor wrapped in banners reading Just Keep Swimming, surrounded by cartoon sea creatures on a blue background.

Anchor with Just Keep Swimming banners

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

The design shows a grey anchor with three wooden banners across its shaft, reading Just Keep Swimming in dark blue script lettering. Around the anchor are cartoon sea creatures: a blue tang, a clownfish, a sea turtle, a pink starfish and a pink octopus-like creature. The shading is soft with bright highlights, set against a dark blue gradient background with small bubbles.

Neo-trad Lettering Anchor Banner Lettering Sea turtle Starfish Octopus Bubble Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Hesper Rose trusted the old anchor once the cable parted off the Cornish rocks, least of all Mr Tulley, who had cursed it every morning for eleven years. Its flukes were rusted to lace and its shank wore a beard of barnacles, but it was the last hook we had. So when the bow rail went in the gale and the chain went with it, I tied a coil of manila round my waist and went over the side in my oilskins, swearing louder than the sea.

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The water was colder than tea left out overnight, and the dark came up fast. A blue fish with a yellow tail swam straight at my face, then turned and herded me the wrong way, which I suspected was on purpose. A small orange fish kept darting in front of my hands like a waiter who thought he knew the table. An old turtle with the face of a disappointed uncle paddled alongside, and a pink octopus wrapped its arms round the rope and pulled it taut towards the flukes. I found the anchor by its smell of tar and rust. A starfish, bright as a boiled sweet, was clinging to the crown ring as if it had paid for the seat.

When I hauled myself up the ladder, Mr Tulley was on his knees by the wheelhouse, scraping at the tin plate he had nailed over the chart table years before. JUST KEEP SWIMMING, it said in blue script, which he had always called a fine motto for a crew that kept sinking. Seawater ran out of my hair onto his boots. He looked at me, then at the rope, then over the bow at the anchor, now holding fast to the seabed.

"Well," he said after a long while, "it bit, didn't it." He tossed me a towel that smelled of paraffin and went back to his scraping. I have never told him the fish did most of the work, and he has never once thanked the anchor, but the plate is still there, and every morning he taps it on his way to the wheel, as if it might still be listening.