Black and grey engraved-style anchor design wrapped in rope, with the script words Refuse to Sink on a torn banner and no body placement shown.

Anchor with Refuse to Sink script

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A vintage engraved anchor with a coiled rope runs down the centre of the design, with a stacked crossbar and curved flukes. The script words Refuse to Sink sit above and across a torn black banner, with hatched linework for shading. The design is printed in black ink on a pale, textured off-white background with no body visible.

Traditional Anchor Rope Banner Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, Brother Anselm has taken the anchor down from the chapel wall again, the one your father hung there the year the Saint Brannock went under off the skerry. He says the iron has sat too long in the damp and wants oiling, but I know he means to carry it to the boathouse and turn it over in his hands the way you turn a letter you have decided not to answer.

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The banner he painted himself in the lamp room, from a strip of black cloth the gale tore off the signal mast. Most of the brothers think the words are a prayer. Anselm says they are an order. Refuse to sink, he tells the novices, as if a man could hold a boat up by saying so. I have stopped arguing with him. He was the one who brought the Mary Dunmore through the north channel with the sea in her hold and the bell rope gone.

Yesterday the abbot sent word that the island is to be sold to the mainland council, the chapel roof pulled for slate and the brothers moved to a house in Carlisle with a garden and no tides. I read the letter aloud at supper. Nobody spoke. Then Anselm stood, lifted the anchor from its hook and set it on the table between the bread and the salt, the rope coiled over the flukes like a hand around a rail.

Come home at Michaelmas if you can, and bring your sister's boat if her man will spare it. We will need every hand to haul the old cross down to the landing and take it over the water, and I would rather it went on a boat with a name than in the back of a lorry. Your brother in the habit, Giles.