Solid black anchor design with sweeping tribal-style lines curving out from either side, drawn as a flash design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with tribal flourishes

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black anchor with a ring at the top sits at the centre of the image, with its flukes curling outwards. Long, tapering flourish lines rise from the base and sweep up on both sides, framing the anchor. The design uses solid black ink on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Anchor Flourish Swirl

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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

Dear Nell, we have been lying at the mouth of the Medway for nine days now, waiting on a westerly that will not come, and the bo'sun has set us to scraping the old anchor until it shines like a funeral spoon. Mr Pryce says the ring has been ringing wrong since Valparaíso and he will not sail on a chain that sings. I have told him it is only the cold.

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Last night the wind did come round, a little, and I was on the forecastle when the cable jumped under my boots. Ned Carrow, who had been heaving at the windlass with his shirt off, caught my sleeve and said, look at the flukes, look how they open like a pair of hands. I looked. In the lamplight the iron seemed to lean towards the bow, the way a dog leans towards a door it wants opened. Then the cable went slack and it was only iron again.

Ned says his grandmother drew the same shape on every letter she sent out to the Scillies, a hook with the weed lines swept up around it like hair in water, so the boats would know which family wrote. I thought it was superstition until I saw him cut the same mark into the lid of his sea chest with his knife, then sit with his thumb pressed to it, murmuring a name I did not catch. He will not say whose. Perhaps he is only homesick.

We weigh at first light if the glass holds. I am folding the drawing into this letter so you can see it for yourself. If I do not write again by the spring, go to Ned's gran in Hugh Town and ask her about the ring. Tell her the anchor held.