Black and grey anchor tattoo on the back filled with starfish, shells, coral, fish and seaweed, with a teal glow around its outline.

Sea life anchor tattoo on the back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey anchor fills most of the frame, with its shank and flukes packed with starfish, a spiral shell, coral, a fish and trailing seaweed. The linework is bold and dark, with stippled dots and grey shading giving the sea creatures some depth. A teal halo surrounds the outline, likely from the skin or a photographic effect, and the tattoo sits on the back against plain skin.

Back Anchor Starfish Shell Coral Fish Seaweed

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, there's a loose board by the bandstand, always has been. Sit yourself down where the lamp reaches. Right, the Pier Ballroom in the summer of 1936, when the band from Grimsby couldn't get their van across the causeway, so they played the whole night with nothing but a squeezeboxer named Walt Pinnock and a gramophone he'd nicked from his aunt. The floor was that sprung maple nobody builds now, and the sea came up under it at high tide, so you could feel the waves in your heels while you danced.

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There was a girl called Nell Harrow who worked the cloakroom, and she'd decided the anchor over the ballroom door was the only honest thing in the building. Rusted, it was, hooked to the beam, crusted with barnacles and weed like it had been dragged from the bottom of the harbour and never got clean. Every dance she'd look up at it and count the starfish she could see from the floor. Eleven, she reckoned. Her mother said there were only nine, and Nell said her mother never once looked up from the coat tallies.

That last night, when the lights went down and the tide was pushing under the boards, Walt played a slow one and Nell stood on the bandstand steps and started singing the words wrong on purpose, so the sailors would have to dance to her mistakes. They did. The anchor creaked on its chain. And when the band packed up at two, the twelfth starfish was gone from the beam, and there was a wet print of a hand on the varnish where someone had steadied themselves, and nobody ever owned to it.