Grey shaded anchor tattoo with a rope coil and cursive script along the shank, on the side of a torso above the ribs.

Shaded anchor with rope and script on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded anchor with a rope wrapped around the shank and a numeral stamped on the stock runs diagonally across the side of the torso. Cursive script follows the rope along the shank, and the anchor has soft grey shading that gives it a raised, metallic look. The ink is black and grey on a light skin tone, framed by a dark garment at the top edge of the photo.

Realism Ribs Anchor Rope Script Numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth, the rain has been coming sideways over Hollis Quay since Thursday, and the tarpaulin over my stall sags so low that the rope-sellers opposite keep prodding it with their broom handles. I have sold eleven coils of manila today, and not one to a man who knew what he was buying.

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The anchor is still under the counter, wrapped in sacking. Your father's mark, the 264, is still sharp on the stock where he hammered it in the winter of the big frost, and the rope he wound round the shank has gone the colour of weak tea. Mr Pardoe came by again with his offer, forty pounds and a promise to hang it above the dartboard in the Ship. I told him it wasn't mine to sell. It isn't. The words he scratched along the shank for you belong to you, and I have never found a buyer who could pay for a sentence.

You were angry with him for the whole of that last summer, and I know you still think he gave up on the harbour, on us, on the boat. He didn't. He simply would not be talked into going quietly. Read the words again when you come home. He wrote them so the rope would hide half of them, which is the only joke he ever managed about himself.

I've hung the anchor from the tarpaulin pole so the rain runs off the flukes and into the gutter. Customers stop and squint at it, and one of them asked if it was for sale. I said no, and he bought a coil of rope instead. Come home when the wind drops. Bring the good thread, the waxed kind, and we'll mend the sail together.