Black and grey engraved drawing of an anchor with a twisted rope coiled around its shank, on a plain white background.

Anchor with rope wrapped around the shank

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a traditional ship's anchor with a ring at the top, a wooden stock and curved flukes. A twisted rope wraps around the shank and loops down past the flukes. The shading uses fine parallel engraved lines, with dense hatching on the shadowed side of the shank and flukes, on a white background.

Traditional Anchor Rope Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall still smelled of floor polish and warm sausage rolls, and Dennis Pryor was already by the urn, holding a paper cup as if someone might take it off him. Thirty-one years, and he still stood as though the headmaster might ask him to take his hands out of his pockets.

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Mr Ashdown kept a ship's anchor in the corridor outside Room Six, its shank bound with an old hemp rope he swore had come off a Grimsby trawler. We were forbidden to touch it. Dennis touched it every morning that summer, and on the last afternoon of term he asked me to hold his bag while he unwound the rope from the stock, coil by coil, as if the whole school might hear.

'I still have the end,' he said at the urn, and from his jacket he pulled a grey coil no longer than my forearm, tarred and furred at the edges. 'Ashdown never counted the turns. Said a proper anchor should never be finished.' I asked why he'd kept it all these years, and he shrugged the way boys shrug before they say something true. 'Didn't want to be the only one who knew where it had been.'

Afterwards we walked out to the car park with pastry flakes still on our sleeves. Dennis looped one end of the rope round the railing by the bins and pulled it taut, and we stood there looking at it, the loose end trailing across the tarmac towards a sea wall we could just smell. Neither of us said we would come back to finish it. Neither of us needed to.