Two black ink thigh tattoos in traditional style, a ship's wheel and an anchor wrapped in rope, each with script lettering, on a person wearing denim shorts.

Ship wheel and anchor thigh tattoos

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two tattoos sit side by side on the upper thighs: a ship's wheel with script lettering above it, and an anchor wrapped in rope with script lettering beside it. The linework is bold and clean, with solid black fills and grey shading on the wheel spokes and anchor shank. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the tattoos are framed against dark denim shorts.

Traditional Lettering Thigh Ship wheel Anchor Rope Script Lettering

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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

Rain had been coming sideways across the fish market since before dawn, and Ada Pell had given up pretending her boots were dry. She stood under the tin awning of Garrow's ice house with the harbour ledger buttoned inside her coat, counting crates as the Morwenna came in low on the swell.

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Her brother Sam was aboard, and so was Eli Brannock, the pilot who had taken her father's wheel three seasons back. Everyone in Porthcarne said he could bring a boat over the bar with his eyes shut, provided someone on the quay was calling the depths. Ada had been calling them since she was twelve, standing on the wet granite with a lead line in her fists and her father's old oilskin swallowing her to the knees.

The wind backed north-east just past the lighthouse, and the Morwenna's bow dropped into a trough. Ada watched the anchor go over the side, the chain screaming through the hawse, and for one long minute nobody on the quay said a word. Then Sam's voice came thin across the water, cheerful and stubborn, saying the holding ground was good. She wrote the time in the ledger anyway, pressing so hard the pencil tore the paper.

When the boat finally came alongside on the slack tide, Eli stepped onto the stones with a brass ring in his palm, the one that had sheared off the bridge rail in the squall. He pressed it into her hand without looking at her. "You were the one calling the water," he said. "Keep that. I'll keep the rest of it."