Traditional-style tattoo of a grey shaded anchor with a yellow ribbon wrapped around it, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor with yellow ribbon on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey shaded anchor with a bold black outline sits at the centre of the image, with a yellow ribbon looping through its shank and ring. The anchor's flukes and ring are shaded in greys to give it depth, while the ribbon is filled with flat yellow. The photo is taken straight on against a plain grey background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Anchor Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had given up counting the drip bags at two and started counting the ribbons instead. Three hung from the nurses' station noticeboard, faded to the colour of old custard, each tied by a family who had sent a man out on the Halcyon Rose and waited for him to come back up the estuary. The fourth had gone round the handrail in the lift lobby the winter her brother's boat failed to radio in on schedule.

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Dan had come back, eventually, with a split lip, a cracked winch housing and a story he told in the pub as though it were funny. He had laughed when she cried in the car park. Now she stood at the window of bay six, watching the floodlights of the fish quay blur through the rain, and listened to the monitor beside old Mrs Teague beep in a slow, uneven rhythm. Mrs Teague's husband had sailed out of Scarrow for forty years and never once missed his tide.

At half past three the switchboard lit up with a call from the coastguard. A tender had lost a crewman off the Pennock bank and was bringing the injured man in by ambulance. Ruth gowned up, found the spare trolley and sent the porter for saline. Nobody on the ward spoke about the weather. They didn't need to. Every one of them had a ribbon in a drawer somewhere.

The man who came through the doors at four was sixty and grey as the quay, shivering under foil. Before anything else he asked her whether the Maud had made it in. Ruth told him it had, an hour earlier, every man aboard. It was the only thing she had said all night that nobody would have to check. She taped the cannula in place, and across the ward the yellow ribbon on the noticeboard stirred in the draught from the open door.