Black ink traditional-style anchor design with three banner scrolls across the shank reading Sleeping With Sirens, drawn as a flash sheet with no body part visible.

Anchor with three banners reading Sleeping With Sirens

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black anchor with a ringed top, crossbar and curved flukes, with three ribbon banners wrapped across the shank. The banners carry the words Sleeping With Sirens in a decorative script, with hatched shading on the ribbon folds. The design is solid black and grey on a plain white background, with no skin or body part visible.

Traditional Anchor Banner Ribbon Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up off the mud at slack water with the sound of a boot being pulled from a bog, and Nell Harrow stood on the foredeck of the Patience and waited for the chain to stop groaning before she let herself look at the river. Fog lay low over the Thames at Limehouse, thick enough that the lamps on the north bank were only smudges.

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Her father had carved the crossbar himself, the summer before the fever took him, and he had never once let her forget that the thing weighed more than the barge's cookstove. Three ribbons were nailed to the shank, the old canvas gone grey and soft, each one lettered in a hand that wandered when he was tired. Nobody aboard could read the third one any more. Nell could, but she kept quiet about it.

Sirens, the bargees said, sang from the Pool on foggy nights, and a man who answered them went overboard with his wages still in his pocket. Nell had never heard one. She had heard only the tide sucking at the hull and a bell buoy somewhere off the Isle of Dogs, its clang as steady as a hand knocking on a door.

When the fog thinned she saw the rope had snagged on a sunken hulk. She went down the ladder, cut the line with her father's knife, and the Patience lurched free. Behind her, something pale turned in the brown water and sank, and she told herself it was a coat, a bolt of sailcloth, a drowned man's hat. She did not look twice. She hauled the anchor up whole, its flukes black and dripping, and lashed it to the bow where it could see the way home.