White line drawing of an ornate anchor made of scrolls, circles and filigree on a dark navy background, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate filigree anchor design

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical anchor is drawn in white linework on a dark navy background. The shaft, crossbar and curved flukes are filled with scrolls, small circles, loops and lattice-like filigree. The design is flat and monochrome, with the ornament evenly spread across the full composition.

Anchor Filigree Scrollwork Circle Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae's thumbs were stained green to the second knuckle by the last week of August, and the old tree at the bottom of the orchard was still refusing the scion. She had bound it three times with raffia, waxed the cut, and checked it each morning like a nurse with a feverish child. Her uncle Stan leaned on the gate and watched her fail with the patience of a man who had failed at the same thing for forty years.

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"You're trying to hold it," he said. "It doesn't want holding. It wants to meet the stock and agree." She didn't answer. In the pocket of her coat was a letter from the council, folded small, about the iron gates at the harbour. Her grandmother had forged them, and the drawings for the flukes and scrollwork had hung in the forge office for sixty years. The town now wanted them replaced with something cheaper. Mae had gone to look at the originals and found her grandmother's pencil in the margins: a ring, a loop, and a note that said "hold here".

That evening she took the knife and the last scion from the cool box. The cambium lined up under the blade, pale and wet, the two green layers finally meeting. She wound the raffia tight but not too tight, the way her grandmother had wound wire round a chain link, leaving room for the join to swell. Stan said nothing. He lit his pipe and sat on an upturned crate until the light went.

Three weeks later she came back alone. A thin green shoot had split the binding and curled at its tip like the end of a scroll. She stood under the tree and pressed her palm to the bark, thinking of the harbour gates, all that lace of iron holding its weight against the tide. The tree had taken. She folded the council letter into quarters and put it in the bin by the barn door.