Black line drawing of an ornate anchor with swirling filigree detail and coiled rope, shown as a flash design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate anchor with rope

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a large anchor with a ring at the top, a crossbar and a curved shank, with rope wrapped around the shank and hanging from the base. The shank and arms are filled with swirls, teardrop dots and small heart shapes. It is rendered in clean black ink linework on white, with no shading or colour.

Anchor Rope Swirl Heart Filigree Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shut that door, you're letting the sea in. Sit down by the range and I'll tell you about the anchor on the chapel wall, the one nobody in Porthgwidden will touch. Old Tom Rowse had it cast at the foundry in Hayle the winter his boy went out on the crab boat and didn't come back on the Friday. Every inch of it, he filled with what he couldn't say out loud. Hearts there, see, and the little tears, and those curls that go round and round like a man trying to find the start of a sentence.

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The rope was his wife's notion. She sent to a chandler in Penzance for three hundred fathoms and wound it round the shank herself, on the kitchen table, under the lamp. She said a thing that's meant to hold ought to have something to hold it back. Each night she added a few turns, and each night her hands were looser, because she was thinking of the Ellen Mary and the gale off Gwennap Head that took her.

The boy came home on the Thursday after, soaked to the knees, having spent four days on the far side of the Lizard with a dead engine and a bottle of water. He walked up past the chapel with his cap in his fist and stopped under the anchor. He didn't say a word. He just ran his thumb down the teardrops, one by one, the way you'd count rosary beads, and then he went in to his mother.

They say there's a slack loop at the bottom of that rope where the last turn was never finished. Nobody in Porthgwidden has ever wanted to be the one to finish it.