Traditional style flash design of a black anchor wrapped in rope and entwined with red and orange roses, teal leaves and blue flowers.

Anchor with roses and rope

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A drawn anchor with a rope coiled around its shank fills the frame, with a cluster of red and orange roses, teal flowers and small blue blooms climbing up the stem. The anchor is outlined in bold black linework with hatched grey shading on the metal, while the flowers and hearts use flat colour fills. The design sits centrally on a plain pale background with the anchor's flukes and ring fully visible.

Traditional Anchor Rose Flower Rope Leaf Vine Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hawser ran out through the fairlead with a sound like a long breath, and the anchor dropped into the grey water of the Sound. Nobody had sounded that water in eighty years. Oona said the bottom would be silt and drowned tram rails, and she was probably right, but the old chart still marked a clean patch of gravel off Harrow Quay, and I wanted to believe in gravel.

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"Give it another ten fathoms," she said, leaning on the rail with her gloves off. Her hands were brown with the lanolin the greenhouse crew used on the roses, and the roses were the only thing aboard that smelled of anything but diesel. We grew them in trays bolted along the stern, red ones mostly, with a few orange and a teal-leaved bush nobody could name. Every trip Oona clipped a cutting and wired it to the anchor's shank, where the rope was coiled round like a sleeping snake, so the crews who came after us would know someone had been here and found the ground holding.

"Ground's holding," I said, when the line finally went taut and the bow stopped its restless swinging. The anchor had bitten. Through the hull I could feel the drag settle into a steady hum, the way a good dog settles at a door.

Oona stood a while longer, then went below and came back with the shears. She snipped a red bloom from the nearest tray, tied it to the ring where the rope met the iron, and stepped back to look at it. "There," she said. "Now the next lot can stop wondering."

The flower was already wilting in the wind off the water, but the knot held.