Black and grey shaded anchor tattoo with a coiled rope on the inner forearm, photographed indoors against a white cabinet and wooden flooring.

Shaded anchor with rope on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large anchor with a rope coiled around the shaft fills most of the frame, shown on the inner forearm of a person wearing a light t-shirt. The anchor has a grey shaded finish with highlights along the metal and a soft, rounded ring at the top. The photograph is taken at an angle indoors, with the tattoo placed slightly off centre against a pale background.

Realism Forearm Anchor Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit where the lamp reaches you, boy, for I'll not tell this twice, and the rope is the part you'll want. Your great-uncle Tomas hauled that anchor off the bottom of Crow Sound the spring the Mary Lowe went down with her crab pots. He hung it on the boathouse wall like a prize, though all it had ever caught was weed and a drowned boot. The rope stayed knotted round the shank, grey with salt, and nobody had the heart to cut it away.

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Forty years on, a girl called Ailsa Penrose came down the slip one wet February with her father's coat buttoned to her chin and asked if anyone still kept the Mary Lowe's anchor. She had a photograph in her hand, a man in oilskins holding a shank just like ours, the same rope bound twice round it. Her father had been a deckhand on that boat as a lad, she said, and had always sworn the knot was his own work. Tomas took the picture and read that knot the way you'd read a letter, and then he sat down hard on the upturned skiff.

He carried the photograph to the lamp and held it up beside the anchor on the wall. The two ropes lay the same way, the twist running right-handed round the iron, as if one pair of hands had tied both. Nobody had ever checked, and nobody had thought to. The girl stood very still, and I watched something in her face loosen, the way a line does when the weight comes off it.

Tomas unhooked the anchor that afternoon and carried it down to the water. The girl held one end of the rope and the old man held the other, and they walked it to the edge of the tide without a word. He let it go, and the rope ran out through their hands until there was nothing left of it but the slack, going down into the green.