Black and grey drawing of a traditional anchor with a rope coiled around the shaft and a knot at the top, on a plain light grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A bold anchor drawn in black ink with a rope wrapped around its shaft, ending in a looped knot at the top. The linework uses heavy outlines and hatched shading on the rope and the anchor's arms, with white highlights along the metal. The design is shown on a plain light grey background with no skin visible.

Traditional Anchor Rope Knot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rope had been wound round the hall hook since March, and Mrs Pruett wanted it gone before the summer lets began. I told her it was a bowline, not a nuisance, and that Captain Haskell would want it kept exactly as he left it. She said Captain Haskell owed us eleven weeks and could owe us from the bottom of the harbour for all she cared.

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He had come to Cormorant House in the wet autumn with a seabag, a brass-cornered trunk and a habit of walking the breakwater at dawn with his hands deep in his coat. Nobody in Sallow Bay had seen him take a boat out, though everybody knew he had been a bosun on the coasters before his knees gave up. The anchor came down from his room in a sack in February. He asked me to hang it where he could see it from the stairs, so I did, and the rope went round the shank in three slow turns, the way he had shown me.

On the last Tuesday of the month the breakwater was empty and the tide was out past the buoys. I went up with the rent book and found the bed stripped and the window open. The trunk was gone. Only the anchor was left, and the rope had been retied at the top into a neat loop, the kind you tie when you mean to come back for something and want it held.

I left the rope on the hook. Mrs Pruett can have her summer lets. Some mornings I stand at the foot of the stairs and count the turns, and I still cannot tell whether he meant it as a promise or as a way of saying goodbye.