Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Brush-stroke anchor design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A single anchor drawn in bold black brush strokes, with a ring at the top, a crossbar, a curved stock and two flukes. Dry-brush streaks, splatter and drips run down from the base and across the shank, while the solid black shapes remain sharp. The anchor is centred on an empty white background with generous margins.

Blackwork Anchor Nautical Brush stroke Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up out of the Skerry Ledge on the third morning of the gale, wound in a ribbon of wrack and a length of chain nobody in Carrick Haven could account for. Tom Penrose carried it up the shingle on his shoulder like a man bringing home a stray dog, and it was me who had to tell him it was not the Merrow's anchor. The Merrow had gone down with her crew in the winter of 1961. Her anchor had been chained to the quay wall ever since, painted so many times the flukes had softened into lumps.

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I keep the light at Scarrow Point, which means I keep the log, and the log says the Merrow's anchor was never lost. It says she was towed in and broken up for scrap. So I climbed the iron stair with the lamp unlit and read the old book by the window while Tom tried to get the thing to stand on its own. The black on the shank was not paint. Where the iron had lain in the bladderwrack it had bled, long drips running down from the base the way tar does when the sun gets at a hull. Tom wiped his thumb through one and it came away on his skin like ink from a pen left uncapped.

In the margin of the log, under a date I did not recognise, my grandfather had written in pencil: anchor dragged in the night, shank marked by the boy, return to whoever claims it. The boy was never named. Tom went home that evening without his prize, and I did not go down to the quay to look for a claimant.

I hung the anchor on the lamp room rail where the spray can reach it. Each night when I trim the wick I see the black run slowly down the iron in the dark, the way a clock keeps time for nobody, and I write nothing in the log about it at all.