Ship wheel, anchor and roses design
Traditional · Black and grey · Flash
The drawing shows a ship's steering wheel overlapping a ship's anchor, with coiled rope wrapping through both and two roses placed on the left and right. The linework is bold and dark, with heavy hatched shading on the wheel spokes and the petals to give volume. The design is rendered entirely in black ink and greys on a white background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The wheel came off the Saint Brannoc in Sunderland with four spokes still bent from the Bay of Biscay, and Old Pritchard would not let the yard men touch the brass. 'That's the one thing aboard that knew the way home,' he said, holding it between his knees like a dog he was afraid of losing.
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He told the boy, Ennis Lowe, how the cable had parted off Flamborough in a northerly, the anchor gone to the bottom with forty fathoms of chain after it. Nobody had slept since the Tuesday. The steering gear had jammed, so they rode the gale on the wheel alone, two men hauling the spokes hand over hand while the sea came green over the rail and the lamps went out one by one.
At dawn the light off Spurn showed them a sandbank close enough to smell, and Pritchard had Ennis brace his shoulder against the spoke until the bow came round. Neither of them spoke after that. The ship limped into the Tyne on a borrowed tow, and the owners wrote the anchor off as lost.
The day before the wheel was sold, Pritchard tied a length of old manila through its hub and round a rusted fluke he had dragged up from the scrap heap. He coiled the loose end twice, pulled it snug, and handed the bundle to Ennis without a word, as if the knot were the only thing left on the ship worth keeping.
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