Fine line black outline tattoo of a rope-wrapped anchor above the words 'I refuse to sink.' on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Anchor with rope and 'I refuse to sink' on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black outline of an anchor with rope coiled around the shank and stock, with the handwritten script phrase 'I refuse to sink.' beneath it. The linework is even and delicate, with no shading, and the tattoo is in black ink only. It is photographed close up on the inner forearm, with the anchor centred and the text below it.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Anchor Rope Script Quote Nautical

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 rain has been sweeping across the car park since seven, and by half nine the tarpaulin over your stall sags like a sail with no wind behind it. You have sold two bags of clothes pegs and a brass ship's bell to a man who wanted it for his allotment. Dorothy from the bric-a-brac next door shouts that the market will be a lake by noon, and she is not wrong, so you haul the rope tight and tie it off to the iron post the way your father taught you, two half hitches and a loop you can undo with cold fingers.

Keep reading

Under the trestle, in a biscuit tin, sits the old door stop, a cast-iron anchor the grey of wet slate. A lad bought gloves off you last month and said his nan had one just like it on her windowsill in Grimsby, where it had held the back door shut through two husbands and a flood. He asked if you would sell it. You said no, because nobody parts with the thing that keeps the wind out. On Saturday he came back with a plain card and asked you to write something on it for him, something to tuck in his wallet. You wrote it in the careful hand they taught you at school: I refuse to sink.

He never returned for the card, and you never found out what he meant by it. The rain has found the gap at the back corner of the stall and is dripping onto the stack of Humber charts you swore were dry. You lift them one at a time and lay them across the bonnet of the van. The top chart has a pencilled cross on a sandbank that has since shifted, and you realise you have been holding the same wrong position for years, out of pride, the way a boat stays moored to a mark the tide moved long ago.

At one o'clock the cloud tears open and a thin white light falls across the tarmac. The stallholders come out to shake their umbrellas. You bend under the table, take the anchor from the tin, and weigh it in your palm. It is heavier than you remember. You set it on the card you kept back, just to see how it sits, and for once the rope on the stall does not need tightening at all.