Line drawing of an anchor wrapped in rope, with a fish skeleton on the shaft, an eye at the centre and radiating rays behind, shaded in blue, purple and yellow.

Anchor with rope, fish skeleton and eye

Colour · Flash

A detailed anchor design with a rope coiled around the shaft, a fish skeleton hanging from the crossbar and a single eye set in the centre of the stock. The linework is hatched and stippled, with soft gradient shading that moves from blue and purple to teal and pale yellow. A faint sunburst of halftone rays sits behind the lower half of the anchor.

Anchor Rope Eye Sunburst Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up out of the Humber mud with a cod's skeleton hooked through its crossbar, and Harold Tapp swore the fish had been waiting for us. Nobody aboard the Mary Ellen Vose wanted to be the one to cut it free, so the bones stayed, bleaching grey in the spray while we worked the Dogger grounds.

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Tolly Greer re-served the hemp on the shank that winter, binding it tight with tarred twine as neat as a lady's stitching, and the carpenter's boy painted an eye on the stock because his mother had told him a watched anchor never drags. Nobody laughed. By March the paint had cracked and the eye looked out at us through the galley hatch every morning, pale and unbothered.

The gale came in off Flamborough on a Tuesday. We let go both bowers and the anchor bit, then dragged, then bit again, and for three hours Harold stood at the windlass with his hands bleeding through their gloves, reciting the names of every harbour that had ever refused us. When the cable finally sang taut and held, the fish bones on the crossbar were rattling like a rosary. Tolly said it was the ship thanking us. Harold said it was the ship counting.

We kept the anchor when we broke up the Vose in '38. It sits now on the harbour wall at Whitby, its rope gone to dust, the eye still painted on its shank. Children climb onto it and dare each other to look straight into it. Most of them look away first.