Black ink ship's wheel with script reading Be the one to guide me, and an anchor with rope and script reading but never hold me down, tattooed on the thighs.

Ship's wheel and anchor thigh tattoos

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two black ink tattoos sit on the outer thighs of a person wearing denim shorts and a striped top. On the left, a ship's wheel is drawn in bold outline with spokes and handles, with cursive script above and beside it. On the right, an anchor wrapped in rope is shown with script curving around its shaft and arms. The linework is clean and the tattoos are shown in black and grey with no colour, against a dark, plain background.

Lettering Traditional Thigh Ship's wheel Anchor Rope Script Lettering Nautical Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wheel had come off the Merrow in the February gale, and by March it was propped against the chandlery wall in Carrick Cove with a tarpaulin over the spokes. Nell Garvie walked past it every morning on the way to the slip. Every morning she swore she would not stop, and every morning she stopped.

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Her brother Davy had cut the spokes himself from ash, the summer before he went out on the Gulf boats and did not come back on them. He had painted nothing on the wood. He said a wheel should be honest about its work. Nell pulled the tarpaulin off on a Sunday and found the grain still tacky with his thumbprint from the varnish, and she sat on the kerb until the bells of St Brannoc rang eleven.

The chandler, old Ivo Teague, came out with two mugs of stewed tea and did not ask what she wanted. 'You could hang it on the breakwater,' he said. 'Let folk steer by it. It's no use to anyone sitting in a shed.'

She said the sea did not take orders from a wheel that was not turning. He said the sea did not take orders from anybody, which was the whole trouble with it. The next week they bolted the wheel to a post at the end of the breakwater, facing the channel. Nell hooked the Merrow's old anchor to the railing beside it and let the rope run slack, so that in any wind the chain knocked against the iron and the wheel swung a quarter turn and stopped. Boats coming in saw the wheel and knew where the harbour lay, and the anchor kept hold of the ground while they came home.