Hand-drawn black pen tattoo design of an anchor with the words Refuse to Sink and swirls on lined notebook paper.

Refuse to sink anchor design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design shows the words REFUSE TO SINK arched over a small anchor, with a looping swirl above and another at the left end of the text. The lettering and anchor are drawn in black pen with bold, even outlines and no shading. The paper's ruled lines and spiral binding fill the background, and the composition is slightly off-centre with a shallow depth of field.

Lettering Anchor Lettering Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bilge pump had given up on Tuesday, and by Thursday the water stood a hand deep over the cabin boards. Ruth Penhallow wedged the tiller with her knee and tore a sheet from the spiral notebook her nephew had left aboard, the only paper not yet pulp. She wrote in capitals, the way Dad taught her to letter the boat's name, pressing hard enough to dent the ruled lines: REFUSE TO SINK. Then she drew the anchor beneath it, because a word without a weight under it is only a wish.

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Her crew was two lads from the island ferry who had never sailed in February. Tomas wanted to radio for the lifeboat. Ruth told him the radio had drowned along with the batteries. She showed him the curl she had drawn above the lettering, a little loop like the wake off a turning hull, and said that was the way they were going: round, and back, and not under.

They bailed through the night in shifts, the notebook pinned under a tin of biscuits to keep it from the wet. By dawn the wind had dropped and the swell had gone long and gentle, and the grey shape of Bryher rose out of the murk like a promise nobody had made to them.

Ruth kept the page afterwards, flattened under the tea caddy at home. The ink had bled into the fibres and the anchor had blurred at its edges, but the words held. Tomas asked her once what the second curl at the end was for. She said it was for going round the problem rather than into it. He thought she was joking, which she was, mostly.