Pencil sketch of a bare tree whose roots trail down into a rope wrapped around an anchor, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Bare tree with roots and anchor sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a gnarled, leafless tree with a knotted trunk and wide, branching roots. The roots gather into a single rope that runs down and wraps around a ship's anchor at the base. The linework is fine and sketchy with light cross-hatched shading in grey, set on a plain white background.

Tree Root Anchor Rope Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Penhallow would not let the lodger go down to the cove that morning, and when he went anyway she sent her son after him with a lantern, though it was broad daylight. The anchor lay where the storm had dropped it, half buried in the shingle below the boarding house, its shank furred with weed and its rope gone the colour of old tea.

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Everyone in Porthgwidden knew the rope. It ran up the cliff path, under the hedge, and into the garden of Gull Cottage, where it split and split again into the roots of the old ash that stood by the wash-house. Her husband had planted that ash the year they married. He had tied his boat's mooring to its trunk, and when he drowned off the Dodman the mooring stayed. Nobody could say which had grown into which.

The lodger knelt and pulled at the rope. It came up through the sand like a root through soil, slow and reluctant, and at the end of it the anchor rose a finger's width. Then the rope gave a small sound, like a knuckle cracking, and the ash in the garden shivered all the way to its crown.

The boy with the lantern said afterwards that the tree had not moved, only that its bare branches had turned, all together, to face the sea. Mrs Penhallow went down at dusk and cut the rope with her kitchen shears. Next morning the ash had put out three green leaves, the anchor was gone from the shingle, and so was the lodger, who had left his door open and his shoes side by side on the step.