Traditional style tattoo of a grey and black anchor wrapped with a brown rope, shown on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope on skin

Traditional · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of an anchor with a coiled rope wrapped around its shank and ring, filling most of the frame. The anchor is drawn with bold black outlines and shaded in grey tones to give it a raised, three-dimensional look. The rope is rendered in browns and tan with darker shadows, and the plain skin background is out of focus.

Traditional Anchor Rope

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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 sports hall still smells of floor polish and crisps, and you are holding a plastic cup of warm white wine by the trestle table when Dean Pearce, who once tied your shoelaces to the radiator, squints at you and asks what you ended up doing. You tell him you work the crab boats out of Bridlington now, four days out and two in, and he nods the way men nod when they have decided not to be impressed.

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Somebody has pinned the old Year Nine art work to the far wall, grey pencil sheets gone soft at the corners. Your anchor is there, the one you drew in biro on the back of your planner because Mr Tully said you could not draw a straight line to save your life. Rope wraps the shank in lopsided loops, and underneath, in capitals you can hardly believe you wrote, HOLD FAST. You remember how that rope burned your palms in PE that term, how he made you practise the bowline until your fingers knew it without you.

Shona Ferris comes over with a carrier bag of old exercise books and the pen she keeps for the committee's bank forms. She asks whether you still draw. You say only knots now, and only for work, and she laughs and tells you that's exactly what she'd have guessed. She hands you the planner, the back cover soft as cloth, and the anchor looks back at you with its daft, earnest shading.

You fold the page into your inside pocket, say your goodbyes to people you will not see again, and walk out into the car park smelling of wine and sea salt. Five o'clock tomorrow, the deck will be wet, and the warp will run through your hands exactly as Mr Tully taught you.