Colour traditional tattoo of a red heart with a MOM banner, an anchor, rope and yellow roses, placed on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart and anchor with MOM banner on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full-colour tattoo showing a red heart with shaded highlights, a banner across its centre reading MOM, and a rope-wrapped anchor above. Yellow and red roses with green leaves sit either side, set against a pale blue outline. The bold black outlines and flat fills give the design a classic bold look, shown close up across the upper arm and shoulder.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Heart Anchor Rope Rose Banner Mom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chain on the cable was still wet when Nell Rickard hauled the anchor up the slipway, and she didn't let anyone help her. Her son Tom had gone out on the Morwenna at four, the way he always did, and the wind had come round before the light did. Nell stood on the harbour wall with a thermos going cold in her hand and counted the masts, one, two, three, the way other women counted sheep.

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The Morwenna came in at dusk with her sail torn and only one man at the tiller. Cal Dunstan had been Tom's shipmate since they were boys stealing crab pots from the Pascoe brothers, and he couldn't meet her eye. He said the rope had parted in the squall, the anchor gone to the bottom off Gull Rock, and that Tom had gone over after the chain with his knife between his teeth. Nell said nothing. She walked to the chandler's the next morning and asked for the thickest tarred rope on the shelf, and paid for it with coins she had been saving for the roof.

Three nights later she sat at the kitchen table with the rope across her knees, unpicking the strands and rewinding them round a tin heart she had bought from the pawnbroker for a shilling. Red paint had flaked off one side. She painted it again with the last of the boat varnish, then lettered a strip of ribbon across its middle in the careful capitals Tom used on his school lunch box. The kettle ticked on the range while the paint dried.

On Sunday, when the tide was slack, she rowed out to Gull Rock alone and let the tin heart go over the side, ribbon first. It turned once in the green water and settled on the pale sand where the anchor lay, and she watched it until the light went out of the surface.