Traditional style colour tattoo of an anchor with an orange ribbon and the words I refuse to sink in black script, on a limb.

Anchor with ribbon and script on skin

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A colour tattoo of an anchor wrapped with an orange ribbon, with a wooden stock and rope detail at the top. The anchor has bold black outlines and blue shading on its shank and flukes. Black script reading I refuse to sink runs beneath it on lightly freckled skin, against a plain background.

Traditional Other Anchor Ribbon Rope Script Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit close to the lamp, and mind the wind, because you'll lose the thread if it gets up over the Head. This is the tale of the Gannet and the anchor with the orange ribbon, which hangs above the door of the keeper's cottage still, if the damp has not had it.

Keep reading

Ivy Tully tied that ribbon on in March of eighteen ninety-one, the morning her brother Ned signed on as deckhand to Abel Crane, who ran the Gannet out of Scarrow with more debts than sense. Ivy had no coin to give him, so she gave a length of her Sunday ribbon instead, and Ned knotted it round the old stock as a joke. The anchor had come up out of a wreck off the Skerries, and three generations of bored boys had polished it bright on their sleeves.

The gale caught them a mile off the bar. The cable parted at the hawse, and the Gannet swung broadside toward the reef with the sea coming green over her rail. Abel Crane stood at the wheel with a stub of chalk in his teeth and wrote across the transom, letters a yard high, so the lifeboat men could read it if nothing else survived: I refuse to sink. Ned hauled the spare by hand, his palms opening on the rope, and the orange ribbon streamed off the stock like a flag nobody meant to surrender.

The boat did not sink. Ned came ashore with the ribbon in his fist, salt-stiff and still orange, and he hung the anchor back where you can see it if you climb up with the lamp, the ribbon knotted tight, and the words still legible on the wood if you know where to look.