Black and grey ship wheel tattoo with script on a shoulder, and an anchor tattoo with script on a forearm, both shown in a close embrace.

Ship wheel and anchor matching tattoos

Traditional · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching black and grey tattoos are shown: a ship wheel with curved script on the upper back or shoulder, and an anchor with script above it on the forearm of a second person. The linework is bold and the ink has soft grey shading that gives the anchor and wheel some depth. The photo is cropped closely, with the people's faces out of frame and the two arms overlapping in the centre.

Traditional Lettering Shoulder Forearm Ship wheel Anchor Script Quote Matching tattoo

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wheel came off the Margaret Ann in a January gale, and Tobias Crewe carried it up the shingle on his shoulder like a yoke. Nobody in Scarrow Bay expected him to keep it. Men who lost a boat usually sold the timber and drank the money, but Tobias sat three nights in the net loft with the spokes across his knees, sanding them smooth with paper he'd bought from a chandler in Whitby.

Keep reading

Mary Oakes, the rope-maker's daughter, found him on the third morning with his hands black from the varnish tin. She dropped a coil of tarred line by the door. "Your brother's anchor is still lying in the Fenwick yard," she said. "Rusted through at the shank. He says he'll sell it for scrap by Friday unless somebody wants it."

"A wheel without an anchor is just a bit of furniture," Tobias said. "It goes round and round and gets you nowhere."

"Then go and get the anchor," Mary said, "and stop talking to the wood."

He did. They hauled it out of the mud at low water, Mary holding the lantern and cursing the weed, and Tobias welded the shank in the rain while she read him the names of the boats that had been lost off that headland since the old king's time. On Sunday they rowed out past the breakwater, dropped the anchor on the old mooring chain, and waited. The line tightened, the little boat swung, and then it stopped. Mary laughed and said it was the first thing in a year that had held still long enough to look at.