Red anchor drawing with a ring at the top, five small stars above and the word HOPE in sage green letters below, on a pale background.

Anchor with stars and HOPE

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A red anchor is drawn in a hand-inked style with a ring at the top, a wooden-look stock and curved flukes. Five small stars and red dots arc above the anchor, and the word HOPE is spaced out in sage green capitals beneath it. The design is centred on a plain off-white textured background, with the colour and lettering kept simple.

Traditional Anchor Star Hope

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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

Sit yourself down, the kettle's still warm and the cat has claimed the other chair, so you'll have to take the stool. No, don't look at the clock. Clocks lie on a night like this. The Ruby Ellen went out from Skerrow in the February of the bad winter with four men aboard and my brother Tomas, the youngest, just seventeen. The glass was falling faster than the gulls could fly.

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They were off the Cauldron Bank when the engine quit. The old anchor had snapped its shackle the week before, so Tomas went forward with the spare, a hammer and a length of chain. He knelt on the wet deck while the sea came over the bow like a lorry off a bridge, beating the ring tight by feel alone. Nobody thought he'd hold on, least of all Tomas. But he had a stub of carpenter's pencil in his oilskin, and when they hauled him back aboard he'd scratched a word into the wooden stock where the crossbar sits, letters crooked as fence posts. HOPE. He said it was for the next man who'd have to hang on to something.

They dropped that anchor at midnight and it bit into the sand, and they rode the storm out with their heads down and their prayers mumbled into the spray. In the morning the boat limped home with the word still there, plain as a shout across the water. The stock went up on the harbour wall, and to this day the children who run along it trace those letters with their fingers, though not one of them could tell you who Tomas was.