Black and grey stippled drawing of an anchor wrapped in two banners reading Reckless and Brave, held up on a white card in a hand.

Anchor with Reckless and Brave banners

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of an anchor with a rope wrapped around its shank and two scrolled banners across it, reading RECKLESS and AND and BRAVE. The linework is bold and the anchor body is shaded with dense stippled dots. The design is printed in black on a white card, held between fingers against a pale background.

Traditional Dotwork Anchor Banner Rope Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Pier Pavilion still plays the same slow waltz every Saturday, out of respect for a lifeboatman nobody mentions any more, so the floor is always half empty and the other half is full of people watching their feet. You have had three gins and a dare. Tomasz Pell from the harbour office says nobody in Porthkerris will ever get you to cross the floor on the drummer's count, and you tell him you have crossed worse. He grins and says the paper has to be earned first.

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Dolores at the cloakroom presses an anchor onto the back of your hand with a rubber stamp, the ink smelling of bleach and pencil shavings, and tucks a curl of paper into your palm with one word on it in her careful schoolroom capitals. RECKLESS, it says. You fold it twice, push it into your pocket, and walk onto the boards before your nerve can file a complaint.

The waltz slides under you like cold water. Tomasz keeps his hand low on your back and counts out loud, and for three turns the room tilts and the lamps swing on their chains like buoys. Then the fiddle stops mid-bar. Somebody at the back says your name the way you'd call a boat that is heading out past the light, and the whole hall turns to look. You are standing alone in the middle of the empty floor, and the sea is coming in under the doors.

Tomasz is already at the stairs with his coat over his arm, looking less reckless than you expected. You take the paper from your pocket and unfold it. There is a second line beneath the first in the same careful hand: BRAVE, then a time, half past two, and a pier number. You look up at the clock above the bar. It is twenty past two. You run.