Traditional colour tattoo of a sailor woman in a rope frame above an anchor, with a dagger and roses, on a leg.

Sailor woman in a rope frame over an anchor

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A woman in a sailor cap with a yellow band and red flowers in her hair is framed by a rope circle, with birds in a pale sky behind her. She sits above a red and yellow anchor, with a rope knot across its centre and a dagger-like shape along the top. The bold black outlines, flat red, yellow, green and blue fills and solid black shading are typical of classic American traditional work.

Traditional Other Sailor Anchor Rope Dagger Rose Flower Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs officer at the Dover quay asked Nell Garrow for her papers, and she handed him a rope instead. It was coiled three times and knotted in the middle, the way her father had tied every line on the Rosalind, and the officer, who had never met a knot he could not undo, turned it over twice before he gave up and waved her through.

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Nobody on the far side knew her. They knew only the cap she wore, grey with a yellow band that had once been her brother's, and the red roses tucked behind its brim the way the girls of the fishing towns wore them on Sundays. She had crossed the water to find the anchor her father had dropped off Gravesend in the storm of the year the Rosalind was lost, the one he swore he would fetch back before he died. Nobody asked her what she was carrying.

At a salvage yard behind the ferry terminal she found it lying in the nettles, its red arms gone brown with rust. The yard man wanted six pounds. Nell paid him with the last of her father's coins and asked only for a hand with the lifting. They dragged it down to the water's edge while the gulls came in low to watch, and she threaded the rope through the ring and tied it off with the same knot. When the line went taut, the gulls rose all at once over the harbour, and the officer at his window saw the rope run straight out to sea, carrying the anchor home.