Traditional style anchor tattoo wrapped in white rope with three red roses and dark leaves, shaded in grey with a black outline, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope and red roses

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded anchor with a rope wrapped around its shank runs down the centre of the image. Three red roses with dark green leaves sit along the anchor, with two near the crown and one at the lower fluke. The black outlines are bold and the grey shading gives the metal and rope a rounded, dimensional look.

Traditional Other Anchor Rope Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came up the coast road the week the herring ran thin, and with it came a stallholder named Ada Crane, who kept a barrow of paper roses and an old rusted anchor chained to its back wheel. Nobody in Scarrow Bay could say why she dragged the thing from town to town. She only said it had been her father's, and that he had left it on the sea bed to keep a promise.

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The promise, as the fishwives told it, was made the night the Gannet went down past the headland. Her father tied a length of tarred rope to the anchor and swore to the water that he would return it if the water returned his boy. The sea gave back the boy, wet and coughing on the shingle, but kept the anchor. Ada's father spent the rest of his life hauling that rope along the stones, plaiting it back up as he went, and every spring he wound a red rose into the coil so the sea would see a debt was still being paid.

At the fair in Hollin Marsh, a boy from the rides came to the barrow with a penny and asked for a rose. Ada told him the roses were not for sale, only for trade, and that the price was something he had lost and not yet found. He thought about it, then said he had lost a tooth in the mud last summer. She laughed, handed him the rose, and took the tooth for nothing.

When the fair packed up for the road north, the barrow rolled off without its weight. Ada had left the anchor on the bank of the river, its rope coiled neatly beside it, with one red rose laid across the crown. The tide was coming in, and she walked on with her hands empty, the wind pushing at her back.