Flat navy anchor design with white rope coiled around the shank and crown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with rope wrapped around the shank

Colour · Flash

A solid navy anchor with a white rope wrapped around the crown and shank, with the rope looping through the upper ring and down the shaft. The shapes are flat and filled, with no shading or fine linework, and the navy contrasts with the white background and rope. The design is centred and shown on its own, with no body part visible.

Anchor Rope Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The anchor came up off the mud at Cookham this morning, bent like an old elbow and still wrapped in the same rope it was dropped with. Dad says it's the hook from the Mary Ellen, the barge that went down in the ice winter, though he says that about every hook we find. I cut the rope free with the galley knife and it came away in one long white curl, tarred at the core. Mum wants the anchor kept for the cabin wall. I told her a barge with an anchor on the wall is a barge that's expecting trouble.

We moored above Marlow lock after dark, and the lock-keeper's lamp came down the towpath like a slow moon. He asked where we were bound and I said Reading, which is true, though Dad's bound for the Mary Ellen's timber, which is not. He looked at the anchor sitting on the coaming, laughed, and said he'd not seen a Cole barge carry a dead man's hook in forty years.

Here is the part I can't tell Dad. When the rope slid off this morning, the knot kept its shape around nothing, the way your hand keeps the shape of a cup after the tea is gone. I know that knot. Eight loops and a half hitch. I learned it from the Mary Ellen's skipper the summer you were born, and I have been tying it in my sleep ever since without knowing why.

Keep the rope. I'll bring the anchor home at Christmas if Dad lets me.

Love, Nell