Black ink drawing of a tattoo design showing an anchor wrapped in rope and a serpent, with two sharks, bubbles and a sunburst behind, in dotwork and blackwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope, sharks and serpent design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of an anchor wrapped in a coiled rope with a serpent's head at the upper left of the shaft. Two small sharks and rising bubbles sit around the anchor, and a sunburst of radiating lines fills the background behind the ring. The work uses fine black linework with dense stippling on the anchor shaft and flukes, with plain paper showing through in the light areas.

Dotwork Blackwork Anchor Rope Shark Serpent Sunburst Bubble Compass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor had been down for two days when the bosun finally admitted the chain was not snagged on rock. It was held, and something was holding it back. Mr Ferris came up the companionway with the lamp still lit though it was noon, and said the rope had gone as tight as wire and was humming in the wind like a plucked stay.

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Captain Hale wanted the line cut, but nobody cuts rope off the Sound of Mull without a reason, and the men had seen what came up with the bubbles. Two grey sharks circled the hull in slow loops, close enough that the cook threw them a salt pork rind to keep them from the rudder. When Ferris finally went down with a knife on a bowline, he came back up pale and said the rope was wound round the shaft like a serpent, scaled with weed, and its head had a jaw full of old iron nails.

He had not cut it. He had seen the brass compass set into the crossbar, the one from the Mary Ellen that the Admiralty had written off in 1861, and the needle was turning slow as a clock. He swore the anchor had been waiting all those years for a crew that would listen.

They hauled at dusk, and the rope came in hand over hand, cold and slick. When the flukes broke the surface the needle had stopped. It no longer pointed north. It pointed astern, toward the harbour they had left, and it stayed there.