Gold metallic anchor wrapped in rope, shown as a small temporary tattoo on a thigh and as two transfer sheets on grass.

Gold anchor and rope design

Thigh · Colour · Flash

A collage of a gold metallic anchor with a coiled rope wrapped around its shank, drawn as a solid silhouette with a textured rope detail. The design appears on white as a large artwork, on a bare upper leg in a small size, and on two white transfer sheets set on grass. The ink is a single metallic gold throughout, with no shading.

Thigh Anchor Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rope had gone green at the splice, and Old Matthew Tallis would not let the boy cut it. 'Fourteen fathoms of good hemp,' he said, 'and the anchor still holding the Mary Ann off the Scarrow reef.' Tom wiped his hands on his jersey and said nothing, because the tide was making and the wind had gone round to the north-east, and they both knew what that meant for the cove.

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They hauled together until the flukes came up out of the mud, gold with weed and wet, though Tom swore afterwards the metal had shone like a coin in a shop window. Matthew sat on the thwart and watched it swing. He said the anchor had been his father's, cast in Bristol before the war, and that every man who owned a thing like that ended up owing it something back. The rope was the debt, he said. You kept a rope wrapped round the shank so the shank would remember the hand that carried it.

Tom asked what the debt was for. Matthew took the coil from the bottom of the boat and began to unwind it, slow, the way you would count money you did not trust. 'Ask me in the spring,' he said. They put the anchor back down in the cove that night, a little closer to the rocks.

In the spring the Mary Ann came home with her hull scraped and her crew singing, and the boy found the rope had been spliced with a single thread of gold where Matthew's knot ended.