Black and grey drawing of an anchor wrapped in rope and a ribbon, with lilies and leaves, designed as a tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope, ribbon and lilies

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A tattoo design drawing of an anchor with a coiled rope and a looping ribbon wrapped around its shaft. Two lily flowers and sprigs of leaves frame the anchor, and the lower flower sits at the bottom left. The linework is fine and shading is smooth and grey on a pale background, with the composition arranged vertically.

Botanical Anchor Rope Ribbon Lily Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Salt Pavilion in Lowestoft was on its third waltz when Dora Keel noticed the sailor by the cloakroom hatch had not taken off his cap. She had been watching him since eight, a man with rope-burned palms and a length of blue ribbon folded in his breast pocket, the sort you buy from a haberdasher on the front and never intend to use.

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"You're not dancing," she said, passing with her tray of lemonade. "Nobody dances with a fellow who stands like a mooring post." He laughed, and it was the laugh that did it. His name was Walter Pryce, third mate on the Sabrina, due out on the turn of the tide, and his mother in Ipswich wanted him to marry a girl from the chapel. "Then I'll dance with you instead," he said, "and you can tell me which of us is the anchor."

They danced the quickstep badly, her hem catching his boot, while the painted lilies on the ceiling dimmed as the attendant turned the lamps down one by one. Before the last waltz he tied the ribbon round her wrist in a knot his grandfather had taught him, a clove hitch that would not slip, and said it would hold until he came back or until she cut it.

Eleven years on, she still had the ribbon, faded to the grey of old pewter. Every spring she walked out to the harbour wall with a bunch of lilies from the market and watched the grey ships come in, and she had never once cut the knot, though the gulls who kept her company had long since stopped asking why.