Black and grey anchor tattoo wrapped in rope, with two shaded stars and script on the shaft, placed on the side of the ribs.

Anchor with rope and stars on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A greyscale anchor with a coiled rope wrapped around the shank, flanked by two shaded stars. Script lettering runs along the shaft and the numerals 6:19 sit on the lower part of the anchor. Soft grey shading gives the metal and rope volume against plain skin, shown in a close crop of the side of the torso.

Traditional Realism Ribs Anchor Rope Star Script Numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Coldharbour House stopped between the ninth and tenth floors the week the wind came off the estuary, and Nan Ashby said that was the building telling her she had to climb.

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She had a length of old hawser her husband had taken off a barge the year before the demolition plans, and she tied one end to the stairwell rail on the ninth landing and carried the coil up with her. Every landing had a door that opened onto nothing but other people's televisions. On the eleventh, a boy with a bike chained to the banister asked where she was going. She said up. He said nobody goes up, there's only the roof, and she said that was the place she meant.

At the top, the roof was a sheet of wet tar with a single iron hook bolted into the parapet, rusted the colour of old pennies. She knotted the hawser to it, three turns and a hitch, the way her husband had shown her on the slipway, and she looked over the edge at the car park lights blurring in the rain, the estate spread out below like a sea that had forgotten its shore.

She didn't jump. The tale says she tied the rope and waited, and the lift came up the shaft on its own, doors open, empty and lit like a chapel. She rode it down to the ground floor while the first stars came out over the car park. The boy was waiting by the bins with his bike. He said she came down looking like someone who had found the bottom of a well and climbed out holding a star. Ask anyone on the estate and they'll show you the hook, still in the parapet, and the rope scar on the lift wall where somebody scratched six nineteen.