Black silhouette anchors and ship wheels of varying sizes scattered across a white flash sheet, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchors and ship wheels design sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of solid black silhouette designs showing anchors and ship's wheels in a range of sizes, some with rope or chain detail. The shapes are flat black fills with no shading or grey tones, arranged loosely across a plain white background. The composition spreads the motifs evenly over the sheet, which suggests a stencil or temporary tattoo design set.

Anchor Ship wheel Nautical Rope Silhouette

Find an artist for this

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

The chandlery on Pier Nine had been under brackish water for eleven years, so the drawer came up thick with silt and smelling of old tar. Tamsin pried it open with a rigging knife and found a flat sheet of waxed card, pierced with stencils: anchors and ship's wheels, some no bigger than a thumbnail, others as wide as her palm. Pell, leaning on the tug's rail with a cup of boiled brine tea, said the harbour used them to mark which crate belonged to which hull, back when the registry still answered its phone.

Keep reading

The last load of the season had to go up the lift to the hulks, and the guards at the top would only pass a crate with a mark they recognised. Tamsin chose the smallest anchor, the one with a rope tail, and laid it against the lid. She sprayed it grey, lifted the card away, and watched the shape settle into the wood as if it had always been there. Pell asked why she hadn't used a wheel. She said wheels turn and anchors hold, and he laughed so hard he had to sit on a bollard.

The crate went up the lift with the others. Nobody at the top looked twice at it, and the guards waved the tug through without a word. When Tamsin came back down the next morning the sheet was gone from the drawer. She found it instead tucked under the tug's mooring cleat, and on the post beside it sat a fresh anchor in silt-grey paint, half a finger shorter than the one she had made, the paint still tacky at the flukes.