Black and grey anchor tattoo wrapped with rope in a traditional style, shown on a patch of hairy skin with a reddened area around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope on skin

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey anchor with a coiled rope wrapped around the shank and the top of the stock. The outlines are bold, with soft grey shading along the anchor and rope to give a slightly raised look against a plain background. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame, with fine body hair and reddened skin visible around it.

Traditional Other Anchor Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lifeboat station at Porthcarrow had three coils of old hawser nobody would claim, and Dilys Penhallow had been meaning to sell them to the scrapman since March. Her brother Tom turned up on the Tuesday with a borrowed van and a pot of black gloss, saying he would paint the winch housing before anyone from the council came round to ask why it was rusting. He did not paint the winch. He sat on the slipway steps with a mug of tea going cold and looked at the water as if it had said something rude to him.

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"Mum wanted you to have the anchor," Dilys said. "The little one off the kitchen wall. She said you'd know where it went."

"It went in the harbour in 1987 with Dad's good spade tied to it. That was a bad day." He turned the mug in his hands. "Rope's still down there, mind. Coiled round the shank like a sleeping dog. I put it there so the anchor would have something to hold."

She had not known that. She sat down beside him on the cold concrete and they watched a gull work at a crab shell on the far wall, neither of them saying anything for a while.

When the tide came up over the slipway at four they walked the length of the breakwater with the hawser coils between them, and Tom knotted one end to the rusted ring at the harbour wall. He dropped the rest over the edge. It went down slowly, black and grey in the green water, until the last of it lay across the sand like a line drawn by someone who meant to come back for it.