Traditional style colour tattoo of an anchor wrapped in gold rope with a seagull perched on the shank, shown on a person's upper body.

Anchor with rope and seagull

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a ship's anchor wrapped in twisted gold rope, with a white bird perched on the shank and a small carved face on the stock. The outlines are bold and black, with grey shading along the anchor and the bird. Red fills the anchor's flukes and the gold rope adds warm highlights, set against pale skin with a dark clothing edge at the right.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the range and mind the pan, because I never tell this story with my hands idle. The Marigold Rose ran coal and salt between Hull and Bergen, and her galley boy was a thin lad called Tobias Venn who could peel a sack of potatoes before the kettle sang. The bosun hated him for it. Cook Hennessy loved him for it, and that was the trouble, because a cook's favourite has no friends below deck.

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The herring gull arrived the week we left the Humber. It settled on the forward anchor, the big old one with the red painted flukes, and nobody could shift it. Tobias fed it crusts from the galley step, and by the second week it had taken to riding the shank as if it had bought a berth. Abel Thorne, the carpenter, had carved a little face into the wooden stock long before my time, a sly thing with its eyes half shut, and the gull liked to sit just beneath its chin as though they shared a joke.

Off the Norwegian coast a squall came out of nothing. The bosun ordered the anchor hove up to save the rail, and the crew went to the windlass with the rope singing through the hawse. Tobias was on the foredeck with the scraps. The gull went up screaming, circled the bow twice, and dived straight at the boy's shoulder. He stumbled back just as the cable parted where the strands had frayed to nothing, and the iron went past the place he'd been standing with a noise like a church bell falling.

After that, the bosun never called him useless again, and every morning the gull sat under that carved face while the lad fed it. Tobias swore the wooden mouth had turned up at the corners. Mind your pan now, it's catching.

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