A colour and grey anchor tattoo wrapped in pink roses, green leaves and rope, with a small script word beside the flukes, placed on the side of the body.

Anchor with roses and rope on the side

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

A large anchor runs diagonally across the skin, with grey shaded metal and a twisted rope wound around the shank. Pink roses, buds and green leaves cluster along the anchor, and a small black script word sits beside the lower fluke. The soft, shaded grey of the anchor contrasts with the warmer colour of the flowers, and the design fills most of the frame.

Neo-trad Botanical Other Anchor Rose Rope Leaves Script Bud

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

The Maudlin Rose had been tied up at Harwick quay for nine days when Bess Curnow finally climbed the gangway with her sea chest on her shoulder and her husband's letters tucked in her stays. The harbourmaster said the ship would sail on the morning tide, and she believed him, because he had the look of a man who had never once been wrong about a tide.

Keep reading

She found Captain Aldous Penhale below deck, bent over a chart weighted at the corners with pewter cups. He did not look up. He asked her if she knew what a ship's anchor was for, and when she said holding fast, he laughed and said no, it was for the moment a ship forgot she had been let go. The rope on the shank had been spliced by Tom Curnow the winter before he drowned, and Penhale had kept the anchor oiled and scraped ever since, though he had never once taken it off the rail.

Bess set the chest down on the chart and opened it. Inside were rose cuttings wrapped in wet sacking, pink-budded and green-leafed, the last of the bush from the garden wall at Pendower. She had carried them two hundred miles in case the captain would let her wind them round the anchor, so that the ship would carry something that was not salt.

He took the cuttings, turned them in his hands, and went up on deck without a word. By the time the tide turned, the flukes wore new buds, and the rope had roses twisted into it, and Bess stood at the rail watching the harbour wall slide away while the captain stood beside her, holding the anchor line loose in his fist.