Black script lettering reading Refuse to sink with swirling flourishes and a small anchor below, tattooed on the side of the ribs.

Refuse to sink script with anchor on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads Refuse to sink in flowing script with swash flourishes around the words, and a solid black anchor sits beneath the letters. The lines are bold and clean with some soft grey shading, and the ink is almost entirely black and grey. The photo is taken close up on the side of the ribs, with the edge of a blue lace garment visible at the top of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Anchor Script Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rope burned through my palms before the anchor found bottom, and Old Demas was already screaming for the second stone. The grain ship lurched against the swell off Cape Malea, and the wind had a voice like a man dragging furniture across a roof. Behind us the rocks showed their white teeth. The captain stood on the stern with his cloak torn open and shouted that the cable should be cut and the ship given to the sea.

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I did not want to cut it. The anchor had come from Lysander the shipwright in Corinth, a squat thing of iron and lead with a ring cast at its crown. He had shown me the words he had chiselled there, small and deliberate, and told me a sailor's prayer was only useful if a sailor could hold on to it. I had laughed and paid him three drachmae. Now I wrapped the hemp twice around the bollard and leaned back until my heels gouged the deck.

The flukes caught somewhere in the sand below. The ship swung, groaned, and then stopped as if someone had taken hold of her by the hair. Demas wept openly, and the captain said nothing at all. By grey dawn we could see the harbour at Gytheio, its fishing boats bobbing like corks, and the anchor was still down there in the dark water, holding.

When the men had gone below to sleep, I climbed down to the bow and rubbed the salt from the ring with my thumb. The words were still there, cut deep enough to outlast the storm: refuse to sink. I thought of Lysander's shop smelling of charcoal and wet wood, and I left my hand on the iron a long time, feeling it hum with the pull of the sea.