Small black and grey anchor tattoo wrapped in rope on the side of an ankle, in a traditional style.

Anchor with rope on an ankle

Traditional · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small anchor with a rope wrapped around its shank sits on the side of an ankle. The outlines are bold, and the metal parts are shaded in black and grey with white highlights, while the rope is picked out with dotted detail. The close shot is centred on the tattoo, with a teal covered surface in the background.

Traditional Ankle Anchor Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up off the Skerry bottom on a Tuesday, tangled in a fathom of old hemp, and Maud Penhallow was the one who saw the rope before anyone else did. It was tarred black where the sea had not got at it, and it had been wound round the shank three times and knotted with a half hitch that no fisherman on that coast would tie any more.

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Her grandfather said the knot was the keeper's knot. The lighthouse on the Skerry had been dark for eleven winters, since the lamp cracked in a storm and the men were taken off in the lifeboat. Before that, he said, every keeper tied his rope round the anchor kept in the lantern room, so the light would know whose hands it was in. Maud did not believe the light knew anything. She believed in iron and in the price of paraffin.

She took the anchor home on the cart and scrubbed the rust off with sand and vinegar until the flukes shone grey and the white strands of the rope showed up through the dark. Then she climbed the Skerry at low water, with the tide drawing back over the weed, and hung the anchor from the rail where the old lamp had been.

That night the lamp came on. Nobody had lit it. The beam swept once across the bay, slow and white, and the boats came in by it, every one of them, from the far side of the headland. Maud's grandfather stood at the window with his cap in his hands and said nothing at all.