Fine line black tattoo of an anchor with a looping swirling line beside it, on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line anchor with swirl on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single anchor is drawn in thin black linework, with its shank, ring and curved flukes clearly outlined. A delicate swirling line wraps around the anchor, suggesting rope or a wave, and is drawn in a lighter grey tone. The tattoo sits on smooth skin along the side of the torso, with a hand visible at the top left edge of the frame.

Fine line Ribs Anchor Swirl Rope Line

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Halfway up the pass the rope starts to hum, and you know from the sound that Evan has slipped on the wet slab below. "Hold," you shout, though the word is lost in the wind coming off the col. You lean back into the rock, boots skating, and feel his weight arrive through the rope like a second heartbeat.

Keep reading

Nothing up here belongs to you. The route was bolted by people you will never meet, and the belay stance is an old iron shank hammered into a crack, its ring worn bright by decades of other people's hands. Someone at the hut told you it would hold. You have never trusted anything told to you on a mountain, but you have trusted iron that has already survived a century of weather, and you clip in because there is no other choice.

The rope tightens. Evan's voice comes up thin and furious, then, as he finds a foothold on the far side of the buttress, almost laughing. You feed slack through the ring, your palms burning, and watch the grey line of rope curl over the lip of the rock and drop away into cloud.

When he hauls himself over the top twenty minutes later, grazed and grinning, he stops beside the anchor and runs a thumb along the ring. "Who put this here?" he asks. You shrug, because you do not know, and because the answer seems less important now than the plain fact that it was waiting for you.