Traditional style anchor flash design with a wooden stock, coiled rope and red flowers with green leaves, shown on a plain white background.

Anchor with rope and red flowers

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A bold anchor with a dark slate blue shank and flukes, a wooden crossbar and rope wound around the shank and ring. Two red flowers with yellow centres and green leaves sit beside the shank, and the rope loops down in front of the anchor. Clean black outlines, smooth gradient shading and a plain white background make the design easy to read.

Traditional Anchor Rope Flower Leaves Wood

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The trowel rang against something that was not a stone, and Ada sat back on her heels in the wet bed and said a word her mother would have sent her to bed for. The earth along the back wall had been turned every spring since 1963, and nobody had ever hit iron there. She brushed the clay away with the side of her hand. A dark shank came up through the soil, then a crossbar of wood gone grey as driftwood, and a loop of rope so rotted it crumbled when she touched it, though it still held its wraps around the ring.

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Her brother Tom had kept a dinghy at the slip below the chapel, and the winter he went out after the mackerel and did not come back, the sea gave up his oars but never the boat. Her father had carved the crossbar from an ash plank the year before, and she remembered the smell of it drying on the kitchen table. She had assumed the anchor went down with everything else. Now here it was, under her roses, as if the garden had been keeping it for her.

She spent the afternoon scrubbing it with a wire brush and a bucket of vinegar until the flukes shone slate blue again. Then she planted red geraniums in a ring around the shank, the same colour as the ones her mother grew by the door, and tied green cord where the rope had been. Her neighbour leaned over the wall and asked what on earth she was doing with a ship's anchor in the middle of a flower bed.

Ada hung her watering can from the fluke nearest the gate and watched the first petals fall onto the wood. It was not a boat, but it held something up, and that was enough for a Tuesday.