Forearm tattoo of a grey anchor wrapped in rope, with barnacles, green seaweed, an orange starfish and Spanish script lettering around it.

Anchor with script lettering on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic grey anchor with rope coiled around its shank sits at the centre of the design, decorated with barnacles, green seaweed and an orange starfish. Fine script lettering in black wraps around the anchor in several lines. The shading gives the metal and rope depth, and the colour is limited to the starfish and seaweed against the grey and black.

Realism Lettering Forearm Anchor Rope Starfish Seaweed Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up out of the harbour mud on the third pull, trailing weed and a starfish clamped to one fluke like a stubborn passenger. Tomás hauled the rope over his shoulder while his grandfather swore at the tide, and the old man's laughter started somewhere under his ribs and came out as a cough.

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They had lost it in the March gale, the night the Santa Marta dragged her moorings and nearly put her onto the breakwater. Everyone on the quay agreed the anchor was finished. It had belonged to the old man's father, and its shank was crusted with barnacles the size of lentils. Tomás had dived for it twice that week, teeth chattering, because nobody else would go down past the kelp line in that cold water.

Abuelo kept a phrase chalked on the wheelhouse door in his careful capitals: SOY EL AMO DE MI DESTINO. He had never once explained it. While the men coiled wet line and argued over the price of diesel, Tomás knocked the mud off the stock and found the iron pitted with old initials, and beneath them a shape like a sea lion's whiskers that might have been a letter, or nothing at all.

That evening the old man sat on the wheelhouse step and read the chalk aloud, then looked at his grandson and said the captain was only the one who went back down for the anchor. Tomás set the starfish on the chandlery wall to dry, where it would stay until the gulls had grown tired of it.