Black ink line drawing of a cartoon sailor with folded arms, a pipe and a cap, showing anchor tattoos on both forearms.

Cartoon sailor with anchor forearm tattoos

Forearm · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black ink line drawing of a cartoon sailor in a cap and striped collar, smoking a pipe with folded arms. Two anchor designs are drawn on the forearms, with cross-hatching on the sleeves and clothing for shading. The image is in black ink only, with a plain white background and the figure centred on the page.

Forearm Sailor Cartoon character Anchor Pipe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mooring rope had been dragged across Scarrow Quay for the third time that morning, and Captain Silas Murk had not moved a muscle. He stood at the bollard with his arms folded over his striped collar, a clay pipe jutting from the corner of his jaw and smoke curling past one squinting eye. The new harbour clerk, a pale young man called Edwin Pettifer, had come down from the ledger office with a clipboard and a face full of regulations.

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"Mooring fees are due by noon," Edwin said, tapping the board. "The Dorothy May has been tied here nine days."

"Aye, and I've been paying for her with these." Silas unfolded one arm just far enough to show the anchor inked on his forearm, blue-black lines crosshatched into the shadow of his sleeve. "Same anchor the old tattooist put on me in Pell Street the year the Wheelwright went down. Ask the harbourmaster. He's got the twin of it stamped on every chain in the basin." He folded the arm back up, and the matter was settled as far as Silas was concerned.

By four o'clock the tide had turned and Edwin had sent for the harbourmaster, who arrived wheezing, took one look at the inked anchor, and laughed until he had to sit on a crate. The mark, it turned out, was the very one cast into the quay's mooring chains forty years back, and the chains had been sold off by a sailor who once owed the town a debt. Edwin copied the anchor into the margin of the ledger, neat as you like, and wrote beside it: Dorothy May, paid in full. Silas's pipe smoke drifted across the page as he wrote, and the clerk blotted the ink with his cuff, then sighed and let it stand.