Blue line drawing of an ornate anchor with scrolled filigree and dotted detail on a textured paper background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate blue anchor design

Colour · Flash

A single anchor design drawn in blue ink, with the shank, crossbar and flukes decorated by swirling scrollwork, fine hatching and small ornamental motifs. The linework is even and the design is centred on a pale, mottled paper background with no body part visible. The image is a single-colour drawing rather than a photograph of skin.

Anchor Scroll Ornament Filigree Nautical

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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

Rain drummed on the awning of Nell Sawyer's stall at Pellow Quay market, and the blue ink in her pot had gone thick and cold. She was wrapping a coil of marline in brown paper when the boy in the yellow cagoule came shouldering through the stalls, a sheet of cartridge paper clutched against his chest and gone soft at the corners.

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He unfolded it on the counter between a brass telescope and a box of cracked sextant glass. It was an anchor, drawn in blue ink, its shank curled into scrolls and its flukes hatched as finely as frost on a window. Nell knew the hand before she knew the drawing. She had made it at fifteen, at the bench in her grandfather's back room, while he sat beside her saying the sea would take the gold off anything brass but would never touch a line properly laid. The boy's grandfather had kept it. He wanted it cut onto a plate for the transom of a boat that had been his for forty years.

She worked the plate that night under the bulb, her graver biting into the metal in tiny, patient curls, copying the hatching stroke by stroke. Somewhere past midnight the rain stopped drumming on the skylight and she realised she had been holding her breath over the ornaments.

He came back at nine the next morning, the plate wrapped in a tea towel. She turned it over in her palm and told him the scrollwork was his grandfather's idea, not hers. The boy frowned at the metal and asked whether the sea would wear it away. Nell said the brass would dull, but the lines would hold, and she found she meant it about more than the boat.