Black dotwork drawing of an anchor wrapped in rope, with bubbles rising from it, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork anchor with rope and rising bubbles

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of an anchor with a rope coiled around its shank and a trail of bubbles rising from the top. The anchor and rope are built from fine stippled dots, with denser dotwork on the flukes and shaded areas. The design is shown in black ink only against a plain white background, centred and vertically oriented.

Dotwork Anchor Rope Bubble Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At ten past three the humidifier on bed six began to gurgle, a sound Ruth Okonedo could pick out through two closed doors. Bed six belonged to Mr Albert Pryce, eighty-one, who had worked as a deckhand out of Avonmouth until his knees gave up. She crossed the bay in her soft shoes and found the oxygen tubing looped over the rail, the little glass bottle frothing silver.

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"You're bubbling away like the kettle in the Harbour Inn," she said, turning the flow down a notch. He watched the bubbles climb through the water, one after another, as if they had somewhere important to be. His father, he told her, had kept a brass anchor on the mantelpiece in Portishead and polished it every Sunday after chapel. The trick with a rope, his father used to say, was never to let it run through your hands without a turn around something solid.

Ruth found the spare chair and sat down beside him, the cord of her lanyard swinging against the bed rail. Nobody else would be up until the handover. The corridor lights hummed. She took the loose end of his tubing and wound it once around the rail, then again, so it wouldn't snag when he shifted in his sleep.

When the day staff came in at seven, the bottle was still bubbling steadily and Mr Pryce was asleep with one hand open on the blanket. Ruth had not looked at the clock once all night, and she found she did not want to start now.