Black ink line drawing of a three-masted ship on hatched waves with a dotted line to an anchor, above the script words Life's roughest storms prove the strength of our anchors, on crumpled paper.

Ship, waves and anchor with script quote

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn three-masted sailing ship sits on top of stylised, hatched waves, with a dotted line descending from its hull to an anchor at the lower left. Fine cross-hatching shades the sails, while the waves use flowing parallel lines, and the anchor is drawn in solid black. The composition is set on crumpled off-white paper, with the script quote Life's roughest storms prove the strength of our anchors written beneath the ship.

Fine line Lettering Ship Sailing ship Anchor Wave Sea Sail Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind has been at the balcony door since teatime, finding the gap beneath it and pushing grit across the lino as if it has somewhere to be. By eleven you are standing in the kitchen with the light off, watching the car park lamps smear in the rain on the glass. Nobody is coming up in the lift tonight. It has been out since Tuesday, and the stairwell smells of wet concrete and somebody's chips.

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Nan's biscuit tin sits on the side where she left it, its lid painted with a three-masted ship under full sail. She came to Hollin Court in 1971, when the blocks were new and everybody said they would last a hundred years. Her husband had worked the Humber ferries, and he hung a cast-iron anchor from a scrapyard above the door so they would remember that a thing only stays steady when something is holding it down. She used to say the storms were never the problem. It was the ones who let go of the bottom too easily who got swept off.

You take the anchor down from its hook, heavy and cold, and knot the washing line round its shank. Out on the balcony the rain comes in sideways and the railing hums under your palms. You lean over. Most of the flats below are dark, but there is one window on the fourth floor where the telly flickers blue, and you lower the anchor hand over hand until it taps gently against the glass of Mrs Hennessy's kitchen.

The line goes taut. The whole block seems to lean into the weather and then stop, and you stay there with numb fingers, feeling it hold. Nan would tell you it's only a doorstop. You let her have that one.