Black and grey pencil drawing of an anchor wrapped in rope with a ship's wheel on the shank, shaded with fine hatching and stippling, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope and ship's wheel

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn anchor sits upright with a coiled rope wrapped around its shank and a ship's wheel fixed to the crossbar. The linework is clean and fairly bold, with the rope and metal edges shaded using hatching and fine stippled dots. The image is in black and grey on a plain pale background, centred and filling most of the frame.

Traditional Anchor Rope Ship wheel Nautical

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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

Night Sister Agnes Marr kept the ward on Tollhaven Hill the way her mother had kept the lighthouse, by walking the corridors until the building agreed to stay put. The wind came off the firth most nights in February and leaned on the windows, and the old men in bay four swore the floor tilted towards the sea after midnight. Agnes never argued. She carried a length of rope in her apron pocket, the stiff kind from the harbour chandler, and when the drip stands began to creep she tied one to the bed frame and felt the ward settle.

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The rope had come from her grandfather, who had sailed out of Tollhaven with the herring boats and come back one winter without his boat. What he left her was a brass ship's wheel the size of a saucer and a sketch of an anchor he had drawn on the back of a tide table, a rope wound around its shank. She had kept the drawing in her locker for thirty years. Nobody on the day staff knew what it meant, and she never told them that an anchor is only useful if something holds the other end.

On the Tuesday the storm came hard. A boy from the fishing families was brought in at two with a crushed hand, and his mother would not let go of him. Agnes sat with them until the sea went quiet, then wound the spare rope round the rail of his trolley, and the boy's breathing slowed to match the tide. Near dawn she went to bay four and found every old man awake and listening.

"She's holding," said Mr Cairns, who had been a deckhand. "Sound as a bell."

Agnes checked the fixings on the drip stand, pulled the knot tight, and went to make the tea.