Black line drawing of an anchor wrapped in a twisted rope, in a traditional nautical flash style, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor wrapped in rope line drawing

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a ship's anchor with a coiled rope wrapping around the shank and trailing off the lower right of the flukes. The linework is bold and even, with short hatch marks on the shank and arms suggesting metal. The design is shown on a plain white background, centred and filling most of the frame.

Traditional Anchor Rope Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor had been lying in the shallows at Porthgwidden for three winters before Tom Keast decided it was his problem. Nobody else would touch it. Its rope was still knotted through the ring, green with weed and stiff as wire, and the flukes had dug themselves into the sand as if they meant to stay.

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He borrowed his brother's sledge and a length of old hawser, and on a grey Saturday in February he and Mary Pengelly dragged the thing up the cliff path, the wind driving sleet sideways into their faces. She counted the stiles aloud to keep them moving. At the top, the field gate hung from one hinge, and the ground beyond was a bog of sheep muck and broken stone.

They sank the shank into the earth by the gatepost and wedged it with flints, then wound the rope round the wood the way Tom's grandfather had wound it round the mast of the Good Intent. Mary tied the last half-hitch with fingers that would not close properly. Tom watched the coils bite and thought that a thing could be held in place by its own weight and one stubborn knot.

By March the gate swung true for the first time in a decade. Mary said it was a poor sort of anchor for a field. Tom said the field had been drifting for years, and he'd rather it drifted with something holding it. Next morning the lambs came through the gap one at a time, bleating at the rope as though it might shift under them.