Pencil sketch of an anchor with a rope coiled around the shank, a design that could suit a traditional style tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope pencil sketch

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a ship's anchor with a twisted rope wound around the shaft and crossing the crossbar. The linework is grey and sketchy, with hatched shading on the rope strands and the curved flukes. It sits centred on a plain off-white paper background with no other objects.

Traditional Anchor Rope Sketch

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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

Mara found the anchor in the long grass under the Bramley trees, where the windfalls had gone soft and sweet and the wasps were drunk on them. It was the old kedge from the wharf at Hollin Reach, the one her grandfather swore had been lost in the flood of 1947, and the rope still lay round its shank, grey and stiff as a wet sock. She knelt and tugged. The hemp came away in flakes that smelt of tar and river mud.

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Her brother had been ringing since breakfast about the pickers. Forty bushels off the Cox trees, he said, and the cider press wanted seeing to before the buyers came up from Bristol. She ought to be in the lane with the crates. Instead she sat on the lip of the orchard wall, turning the iron in her lap, and looked down the slope to where the brown water showed between the poplars.

The barge had moored there every September for as long as anyone could remember, taking the fruit down to the coast on the evening tide. Nobody took it now. The lock keeper had gone to Spain and the wharf had a fence round it. Yet the rope was still wound round the anchor in the half-hitch her grandfather had taught her, the one that held without slipping.

She untied it. The knot came apart in her fingers as if it had been waiting for her. Then she walked down the slope with the old hemp coiled over her shoulder and the anchor knocking against her hip, past the windfalls and the drunk wasps, towards water that had not forgotten the way.