Black and grey traditional anchor tattoo on a forearm, with two banners reading SINK OR SWIM and leaf shapes above a ring at the top of the shaft.

Anchor with Sink or Swim banners on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Shown from two angles, a black and grey anchor sits on a forearm, with a ring at the top of the shaft and leaf shapes spreading above it. Two banners wrap the shaft carrying the words SINK OR SWIM, and the anchor flukes curl out at the base. Bold outlines are filled with dense dotwork shading and solid black areas, with no colour ink.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Anchor Banner Lettering Leaves Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was already sliding off the slip when Mags Tennant flung the bowline at me, and I caught it the way a fool catches a bee, with both hands and no plan. Behind her the Gannet Dunn heaved against the swell, its anchor chain grinding up through the hawse like a drawer of cutlery dragged across stone. Nobody on Corrigan Reach waited for a second crossing. You went or you stayed.

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Harbourmaster Vole had nailed a board above the ticket hatch years before, two painted banners wrapped round a black anchor, and beneath them the words that had served the island as a sort of prayer ever since. My grandfather called it a joke. My mother called it a warning. I thought of it as I hauled the rope taut and felt the whole weight of the boat lean into my palms, pulling me toward the grey water.

I did not sink. Mags laughed, the wind tore the laugh to pieces, and she tossed me a second line, thicker and tarred, saying the sea was only a question of whether you let go of the thing you were holding. So I let go of the bowline. The Gannet Dunn slid out past the breakwater, and I stood on the slip with wet palms and nothing in them, and for the first time in my life the harbour felt like a place I could walk away from.

The next morning I found the anchor board in the shed, its paint flaking, and I took a brush and added a third banner underneath. I wrote one word on it, and the word was STAY.