Close-up of a blue traditional-style anchor tattoo with a rope wrapped around its shaft, on a person's upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue anchor with rope on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A solid blue anchor with a crossbar and a twisted rope wound around the shaft sits centrally on tanned skin. The outlines are dark and the fill is a flat, bright blue with lighter highlights along the edges. The tattoo fills the centre of a close crop, with a small section of the arm and a blue garment visible at the right edge.

Traditional Upper arm Anchor Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hauling the second net, you see the anchor before the gulls do: a blue-black shape twisted up in the mesh, its crossbar snagged on a loop of old hemp that somebody lost off Scarborough years back. Skipper Dunn says leave it. Nobody leaves iron on a Hull trawler when scrap is fetching what it is, so you work the hook loose with a gaff while the deck lurches under your boots.

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It comes aboard streaming, heavier than it looks, and the rope wound round its shank is still sound, tarred and thick as a wrist. You coil it on the hatch cover beside the others. Dunn turns the anchor over under the work light and says his grandfather cut the same mark into the wheelhouse door in 1961, then never once said why. You ask whether it's lucky. He says it's heavy, which is different.

By noon the fleet has dropped behind the Dogger Bank haze and the wind has backed west. You are the one who rigs the davit to swing the anchor back over the bow, because a trawler in this swell needs its own weight forward or it will spend the night broadside and miserable. Dunn keeps one hand on the wheel and the other on the chain, and when the flukes finally touch water you feel the boat settle, the way a horse does when the rider stops fighting it.

Ten minutes later the radio crackles: the Ailsa Mae is drifting off Flamborough with her engine dead and asking for a tow. Dunn looks at the wet rope on the hatch, then at you. Take the spare line, he says, and the bosun's knife. Whatever's out there will need tying to something.