Shaded grey anchor wrapped in rope and decorated with blue flowers, with script initials on the stock, in a traditional style on the lower leg.

Anchor with rope and blue flowers on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded anchor with a coiled rope and script initials on the stock, decorated with clusters of blue flowers and small white blossoms. The anchor uses dark outlines and soft grey shading for its metal parts, while the flowers are filled with bright blue colour. The design fills the frame diagonally, with the anchor's flukes at the lower right and the ring at the upper left.

Traditional Botanical Calf Anchor Rope Flower Initial Script

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor had lain by the slip since the Harrow Lass came home without its master, and nobody in Skerrow Bay had the strength to shift it. Ada Lowe went down each spring with a coil of old hemp over her shoulder and wound it round the stock the way Jack had shown her, under the ring and across the cross-bar, where his initials were cut deep enough to hold the rain. The squill came up on the cliff path at the same time, and she pulled a handful each morning and tucked the stems into the coils until the whole thing looked less like iron than a garden that had wandered down off the hill.

Keep reading

The Pell boy watched her do it for three springs before he asked why. He was nine and had his father's habit of asking what a thing was for. She told him the anchor had never been for holding ships. It was for holding a place still, so the men had something to steer by when the fog came down the bay, and the flowers were only what grew when you stopped minding the weather.

Tom said that was daft. Then, in the fourth spring, a grey-bearded man walked up from the coach stop with a sea bag on his shoulder and asked for the Lowe woman. He had sailed with Jack on the Harrow Lass, he said, and had come to tell her about the last night, though he had not got much further than the gale before she held up one hand and stopped him.

She gave him the other end of the rope. They wound it together until the flukes were the only bare iron left, pointing out past the harbour wall to where the tide was already turning. Tom ran off to fetch more squill, and Ada let the old man work the knot, because some things were easier to hold still with two pairs of hands.