White line drawing of an anchor with a twisted rope tied in a bow at the top of the shank, on a plain black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope bow design

Black and grey · Flash

A white line drawing of an anchor, with a twisted rope tied in a bow around the top of the shank and two rope curls extending outwards. The anchor's arms and flukes are drawn as single thin lines, and the rope has a striped, twisted texture. The design sits centred on a plain black background with no shading or colour.

Anchor Rope Knot Bow Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry to Scarrow Bay stopped running the winter the old pier cracked, so for a whole season the only way across the sound was Mabel Torrance's rowing boat, and she charged a penny a crossing and asked no questions of anyone. Her husband had gone down with the trawler Girlie Ann off the Skerries, and his anchor had never come up with the wreck. She kept the spare one in the shed, rusted to the colour of dried blood, and she would not let the boys from the harbour touch it.

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In March a girl of nine came down to the slipway with a parcel tied in string and asked to be rowed to the mainland to see a doctor about her grandfather's chest. Mabel took the penny, took the girl, and pulled hard through the grey chop. Halfway over the girl untied the parcel and showed her a bundle of rope ends, each one worked into a little knot, a bow on the end of every length. She had been practising, she said, because the grandfather had told her that a bow holds where a hitch slips, and that a woman on the water needs to know the difference.

Mabel said nothing for a while. Then she shipped the oars, reached under the thwart, and pulled out the old anchor and its tangle of line. She tied the girl's best bow around the shank, pulled it tight, and said that was the only knot worth trusting in a gale. They rowed on, the anchor riding in the bottom of the boat like a sleeping dog, and when they reached the mainland the bow was still holding.