Watercolour and ink drawing of an anchor wrapped in rope, with pink coral, barnacles and a red starfish, designed as a tattoo design.

Anchor with rope, coral and starfish

Colour · Flash

A detailed anchor is shown centred on a white background, with a coiled rope winding around its shaft and tied at the ring. Pink coral branches, small barnacles and a red starfish are scattered across the anchor, with fine hatched ink lines defining the metal. The palette combines blues, teals and greens with pink, red and brown accents, and the design is well balanced and fills the frame.

Anchor Rope Coral Starfish

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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

The water tanker had been on the Dry Lake road since first light, and the road ran so straight across the pan that nothing could hide from it for long. That was how I saw the ring first, a dull green loop poking out of the crust like a knuckle, with a rope still knotted through it. I stopped the cab, climbed down, and the heat came up through my boots before I'd taken three steps.

Keep reading

It was an anchor, a proper one, half sunk in the cracked salt with its flukes pointing at a sky the colour of dishwater. The rope had gone stiff and grey, but it was still tied on. Someone had grown pink coral up the shank, brittle as old bone, and the barnacles had dried to chalk. On one fluke a starfish had survived all those years, bright red and absurdly cheerful, as if it had only just been told the tide was out. Mags, who runs the survey crew out here, says the whole pan was seabed once. I told her that was rubbish. She told me to prove it, so I tried to lift the thing, and it didn't budge.

We spent the afternoon digging around it with a shovel and a dented paint scraper. By dusk we'd freed the stock and not much else, and Mags said we'd leave it for the scientists, who would want it photographed and logged and probably put in a glass case in a city. I drove on with the tanker half empty and the anchor rope coiled on the passenger seat, because I'd cut the end free and couldn't bring myself to leave it. At the next crossing I pulled over and wound the rope around my wrist. The wind came across the flat with nothing to stop it, and the rope hummed against my hand the way a shell does when you hold it to your ear.