Solid black anchor design with a rope coiled around the shank and a knot near the ring, shown as a flat stencil-style drawing on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope wrapped around the shank

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a ship's anchor with a twisted rope wound around the shank and tied near the ring. The image has no shading, with the design formed entirely of flat black fills and clean edges. It is shown on a plain white background with no colour.

Blackwork Anchor Rope Knot Nautical

Find an artist for this

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

Old Tamsin Rowe kept the anchor in the net loft because no one on the quay would take it off her. It had come up in the trawl the winter her husband went out past the Mewstone and did not come back, and she had hauled it up the steps herself, the rope still wound round the shank, the knot at the ring pulled so tight it looked grown there.

Keep reading

The boatmen said the rope was bad luck. A line tied like that, they said, would hold a boat to the bottom of the sea and never let go. Tamsin said nothing. She cut the rope away with her gutting knife, and in the morning it was back on the shank, wound the same way, the same knot at the ring, the cut ends neatly spliced.

That autumn a gale came in from the west and the Ellen began dragging her mooring in the dark. The youngest Pascoe boy ran up the loft steps with a lantern, and Tamsin put the anchor on her barrow and wheeled it down the slip to the water. She rowed out with the boy at the oars, and the wind was so loud they could not hear themselves think. She threw the iron over the bow of the Ellen, and the rope ran out after it, hissing through the rowlock, until the flukes bit into the rock below and the line went taut.

The Ellen rode out the night. In the morning the boatmen came to the loft with their caps in their hands and asked what she wanted for the anchor. Tamsin said it was not for sale. She took the rope in both hands, found the old knot at the ring, and tied it again.