Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing an anchor wrapped in rope and vines, with two roses and a ribbon banner, drawn in black and grey.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with roses and rope in pencil sketch

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an anchor entwined with a twisted rope and thorny vines, with two open roses on the shaft and a curled ribbon banner across the lower arms. The linework is loose and sketchy with light shading on the rope, banner and petals. The design is drawn in graphite on white paper and is centred on the page.

Traditional Anchor Rose Rope Vine Banner Ribbon

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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

Dear Nell, the wind has been foul since Tuesday and the mate says we'll not raise the Azores before Michaelmas, so I am writing this by the lamp in the forecastle while the boys snore around me. You asked in your last whether the anchor I carved on the galley table was meant for the ship or for you. It was meant for the ship, you daft thing, though I'll admit the roses were my notion and not the bosun's.

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Old Tobias Crane, who has sailed with this vessel longer than the paint has held, told me that a sailor who wants to come home must first learn to be held fast. He tied the rope round the shank himself that morning off Gravesend, twisting the strands the way his own mother taught him, and said the thorns were for the things a man would rather forget. I laughed, and he didn't, and I've thought about it every night since.

We lost the foretopsail in the squall on Thursday, and the ribbon of it went streaming off like a banner over the water. Nobody cried, though I saw Jem press his face into a coil of hemp when he thought no one was looking. When the sun came up the anchor was still down, and so were we, and that was the whole of the miracle.

Keep the lamp lit for me, Nell. I'll be the one with the rope burns and the crooked grin, trying to look as if I'd never once doubted the ground.