Colour realism tattoo of an anchor wrapped in rope and pink roses and blue foliage, on the outer thigh.

Anchor with pink roses on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large anchor wrapped in rope is entwined with pink roses, blue-green leaves and small blue flowers. The anchor is shaded in grey and silver tones with highlights, while the flowers are rendered in soft pinks and blues. The design fills the upper outer thigh, with denim shorts visible at the top of the frame and a red surface behind the leg.

Realism Thigh Anchor Rose Flower Rope Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, you lot, and mind the kettle, because this is the one about Tomas Penrose and the anchor that came home. Nobody on Skerra had seen an anchor that size since the Maud went down off the Grey Stacks in the winter of the big gales. It came up in the shallows at low tide, forty stone if it was an ounce, trailing rope behind it like the sea had been trying to keep hold of it.

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Tomas wanted it for the harbour wall. His mother wanted it for nothing at all, because she said a thing that had been down so long had earned its rest. Between the two of them the anchor sat on the slipway all summer while the gulls argued over it. Then Ada Quill, who kept the glasshouse behind the chapel, walked down one morning with a barrow of pink roses from her cuttings and asked whether she might plant them at the anchor's foot. Nobody thought she meant it. She did.

By August the roses had climbed the shank and gone round the flukes, and the little blue flowers she called forget-me-nots had come up between the links of rope as if they had always been meant to grow there. Tomas came down to scrape the weed off the stock and stopped with the blade in his hand. The rope had gone soft with age, but the roses held it. Every bloom faced the way the boats came in.

That's the whole of it, mind. The anchor never went back to sea and the Maud's men never came home, but on Skerra we say a thing is only lost while nothing grows on it. Now drink your tea before it cools.