Black linework flash design of an anchor wrapped in rope with two swallows in flight on either side, drawn on a cream background in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope and two swallows

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a ship's anchor with rope coiled around the shank and ends, with a swallow perched on each side of the crossbar. The linework is bold and even with no shading, and the design sits centred on a plain cream canvas-coloured background.

Traditional Anchor Rope Swallow Bird

Find an artist for this

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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the candle, Brother Aldous has already set one fire in the scriptorium this week. You want to know why the swallows sit on the anchor and not the gull or the crow? It begins with old Tobiah Vane and his boat, the Mercy of Scarth, which the priory bought off him for a barrel of salted herring and a promise to pray for his wife's bad knee.

Keep reading

The Mercy's cable parted in a February gale off Scarth Head. The anchor went down with nothing to hold it, and the boat began to drag toward the black teeth of the reef. That spring the swallows came back early, a grey cloud of them skimming the harbour wall in the rain, and every fisherman swore they were a bad omen. Then one pair dropped out of that cloud and settled on the crossbar of the anchor lying on the quay, and would not be moved for love or money.

Brother Hal was a boy then, scrubbing the bilges, and he reasoned that a bird which knows the way home from Africa knows the way into a harbour. He ran to the boathouse, took the coil of new hemp, and followed the swallows' line over the spray, tying off where the old rope had torn. The tide turned, the Mercy swung, and the reef let her go with a groan you could hear from the chapel.

And that is why the anchor has two birds on it, and why Vane never once asked the priory for the price of that rope. The birds had been pointing the way all along, and the boy only had the sense to look up. Now, the candle. Out, Aldous. Out.