Colour tattoo of an anchor wrapped in rope and pink roses with blue flowers and green vines on a limb.

Anchor with pink roses and blue flowers

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

An anchor with a rope wrapped around its shank is decorated with pink roses, small blue flowers, buds and green vines. The anchor is shaded in black and grey with fine hatched detail, while the flowers and leaves use soft pink, magenta, teal and green ink. The anchor runs diagonally up the frame, with the roses clustered on the left and near the top of the design.

Neo-trad Botanical Other Anchor Rose Rope Flower Blue flower Bud Leaves Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The relief boat was late again, so you sat on the harbour wall with the anchor across your knees and scraped at the barnacles with a bread knife. Mrs Penhale had sent you down for it that morning, saying the men at the slipway had hauled it out of the shallows after the squall and nobody wanted to claim it. Under the grey crust the iron was sound. Under the iron, when the knife finally bit through, there was paint: a rose the colour of boiled sweets, then another, then sprigs of blue forget-me-nots curling round the shank like they were trying to climb it.

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You knew the handwriting before you read it. Ada Penhale had painted the same flowers on every bucket, bench and lamp housing on the rock the year after her husband's boat went missing off the Skerries. She had said it was so the light had something to look at besides the sea. Someone had scratched a name into the crown with a nail: SILAS, and under it a date in 1931, and a small hand-drawn lighthouse with its beam going the wrong way. The rope still knotted round the shank had gone stiff and green, but it held when you tugged it.

You carried the anchor up the hundred and twelve steps on your shoulder, stopping at every landing to rest your arm. Nobody stopped you. At the top, the lamp was already turning, slow and white, and you hung the anchor on the iron rail of the gallery where the sweep of light would pass over it. The first pass made the roses blaze pink. The second pass made the forget-me-nots flicker blue. By the third you had stopped waiting for the boat and were simply watching the paint come back to life, one flower at a time, each time the beam came round.