Black ink sketch of an ornate anchor with swirling scroll details, drawn on paper beside a black marker and a gel pen.

Ornate anchor sketch with scrolls

Black and grey · Flash

A pen sketch of an anchor with a looping, ornamental top and a rope-like coil wrapping its shank. The linework is bold black with cross-hatched shading on the flukes and fine curls and dots decorating the arms. The design sits centrally on a plain off-white page, with a Sharpie marker and a gel pen lying to the right.

Anchor Swirl Scroll Rope Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bow line has wrapped itself round the anchor shank again, three full turns, and the Trent is pushing the barge toward the weir while you hang over the rail with a marlinspike and a sour temper. Up in the wheelhouse Old Ferris is shouting that you'll never shift a knot by glaring at it. He says the scrollwork on the anchor head was cast by his father in Gainsborough, the curls meant to catch weed and nothing else, and that the rope was never supposed to go anywhere near them.

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You work at it anyway, because the water is brown and fast and the cutwater is starting to hum. Somewhere in the fourth turn you stop swearing. The coil isn't a tangle at all. Someone has laid it in a tight spiral, each loop finished with a half hitch, and the hitches are counted, one for every summer since the barge was last moored on the Ouse. You hold the rope still and look up. Ferris has come to the rail with his cap in his hands.

"Maud tied that," he says. "The summer she left. Said the boat should stay put until one of us came back to untie it." You don't ask whether anyone came back. You feel along the rope for the last hitch, find the stiff old knot with your thumb, and cut it with the blade you keep for baling twine.

The rope springs loose, the anchor drops with a sound like a bell struck underwater, and the chain runs out after it. Ferris watches the slack go taut on the bottom. The scrolls on the anchor head are bare now, free of rope, and the current slides around them as if nothing had ever been caught there at all.