Black and grey traditional anchor tattoos with rope and script lettering on both thighs, worn above striped over-knee socks.

Matching anchor tattoos with quotes on thighs

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching anchor tattoos sit on the thighs, each with a rope-wrapped anchor and a cross-shaped stock. Script lettering curves around the anchors, reading 'Just leave no words unspoken' on the left and 'Save regrets for the broken' on the right. The work uses bold outlines and tonal grey shading, and the legs wear black and white striped socks.

Traditional Lettering Thigh Anchor Rope Cross Lettering Script Quote

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

Maren Tulley had forged anchors in Corran Bay for thirty years, and she knew the sound a bad weld made before it failed. The two anchors on her bench that March were for the Gull Ladder twins, Ada and Thess, who had run their father's cutter since his lungs gave out. They wanted matching marks, rope bound round the shanks and a cross for the stock like the one on their mother's grave. Maren drew them on wax paper and kept her opinion of the price to herself.

Keep reading

Ada came alone the evening the second anchor cooled. She stood in the forge doorway with her hands buried in her coat and asked whether the words could be cut into the iron as well as the scroll. She read them off a folded slip in a voice that went thin on the last syllable: just leave no words unspoken. Maren took up the chisel. She had cut the first line when Thess appeared behind her sister, looking at the second anchor as if it owed her money.

"That's not the sentence," Thess said. "Save regrets for the broken. Mother said it at the window the morning the Ladder took the boat, and you both heard her." Nobody answered. The fire ticked. Maren understood then that the twins had quarrelled over which words belonged to whom, and that neither would admit it in front of the other.

She cut both lines that night, one on each anchor, and wrapped the iron in sacking so the frost would not get into the letters. In the morning she stamped her own small mark on the underside of each fluke, where no one would look. The cutter went out on the tide with both sisters aboard, and the anchors held through the bar that winter. Maren never learned which twin had spoken first, and she never asked.