Shaded grey anchor wrapped in a chain, with purple hibiscus flowers and grey leaves, a realistic colour tattoo on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with purple hibiscus flowers

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A grey shaded anchor with a rope or chain wrapped around its shank sits in the centre of the design. Two large purple hibiscus-style flowers and grey leaves surround it, with soft blended shading on the petals and smooth greyscale modelling on the anchor. The composition is a compact, roughly vertical cluster set against plain skin with a dark vignette around the edges.

Realism Botanical Other Anchor Hibiscus Flower Leaves Chain Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sports hall still smelled of floor polish, and Carl Madden was at the far trestle with a plastic cup of squash, turning it slowly as if the orange might tell him something. We had sat under Mr Pryce's map of Madeira in geography, the summer before our exams, and promised each other we would go wherever the pins pointed. I had stayed in Hull and sold insurance. He had not.

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He had gone to sea on a container ship out of Southampton and ended up in Funchal, where the hibiscus grew over the harbour walls like a hedge that had given up pretending to be tidy. He showed me a photo on his phone, purple blooms against a grey sky, then rolled up his sleeve to show me the anchor inked over the same flowers, its chain looped down the shank like something he had forgotten to take off.

"You never came back for the reunions," I said. "I came back for the squash," he said, and laughed, though his eyes stayed on the anchor. He told me the ship had been broken up in Alang, that the old bosun had kept a hibiscus cutting in a paint tin on the bridge, and that nobody had the heart to throw it overboard.

He slid a beer mat across the table. "Write down the address," he said. "You still owe me a postcard from Hull." I took the biro from behind my ear and wrote it out, and when I looked up the chain was still wound around the anchor on his arm, and the purple flowers had gone dark under the strip lights.