Pencil and pastel flash drawing of a woman with braided hair, an anchor tattoo on her cheek and blue script across her braid, in a traditional style.

Braided hair woman with anchor and script

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woman with her eyes downcast, her hair pulled into a large braid that falls over her shoulder. A black anchor sits on her cheek, and a pale blue banner with looping script runs across the braid. Fine graphite linework and soft shading sit on a pale pink background, with small touches of red on the cheek and blue on the banner.

Traditional Lettering Woman Braid Hair Anchor Script Banner Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Tarrant had been splicing rope on the Shields quay since she was eleven, and by spring the bosun of the Gannet swore she could mend a cable with her teeth. She sat on an upturned crate with tarred hemp across her knees, working three strands over and under until the lay came up tight as a church bell rope. Her father had taught her the anchor splice before the fever took him. The rest she learnt out of spite.

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The Gannet sailed on the morning ebb with Owen Mabbott at the wheel, and Nell watched from the wall with her hair plaited so thick it fell past her waist. Owen had promised a letter. It came in June, folded into the shape of a small boat. It said the crew had voted to letter a new name on the ship's board, and the name was Shipshape. The mate had laughed until he choked on his tea, Owen wrote, and then made them all do it again properly.

Nell laughed too, alone in the rope walk. She unpicked an old anchor warp from the loft and braided its good yarn into a band as wide as her palm. She dyed it the pale blue of the harbour on a clear morning and worked her own script into it with a sailmaker's needle, letters looping off the edge the way Owen's always did. She could not have said why, except that a thing ought to be finished before someone came home to see it.

The Gannet came back in October with her board freshly painted. Nell was already on the quay, her braid over one shoulder and the band knotted round it in the splice her father taught her. Owen read the stitching twice before he looked up. Then he took off his cap and asked if she had kept the wheel steady in his absence, and she said she had kept everything steady, which was true.