Black and grey tattoos of a shaded skull, ship wheel and snake on a forearm, with an anchor and roses on the back of the hand.

Skull, ship wheel and anchor on forearm and hand

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries a shaded skull with a snake coiled around it, a dotted background and a ship's wheel below. The back of the hand shows an anchor wrapped in rope with two roses, and short letters sit across the knuckles. The work is entirely in black and grey, with soft tonal shading against a blurred brick wall.

Realism Traditional Forearm Hand Skull Ship wheel Snake Rose Anchor Rope Star Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hawser had gone stiff with salt overnight, and Ruth Pellow worked it through her gloves one fathom at a time while the tide turned under the Canning Dock gates. Across the water a crane swung empty, its hook knocking against nothing. Her father had taught her to read a rope by its lay, to tell a good splice from a lazy one by how the strands sat, and he had always said a coil could tell you the weather if you let it.

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Nobody had seen the Maud Harrow come in. The pilot boat had reported her off the Bar at four, a dead rudder and a broken wheel, and then nothing. Ruth found the wheel itself on the quay two hours later, lashed to a pallet of bricks, its spokes gone grey and a rose carved into the hub where the brass should have been. Someone had wanted it found by a person who would know what the rose meant.

She carried it up to the chandlery on Wapping Road, where old Sid Okafor kept the charts and a stove that never went out. He turned the wheel over under his lamp, ran a thumb along the carved petals, then went to the back shelf and came back with a ledger. Inside, in the same looping hand as the rose, was a line she had never expected to read: *Taken on at Liverpool, one ordinary seaman, name to be given when he's sober.*

Ruth read the date twice and understood that the Maud Harrow had not been lost at all. She had been steered home by someone who did not want to be found, and the anchor drawn on the ledger's cover pointed the way in. She tied the hawser off on the bollard, tucked the ledger under her arm, and went to find out who had been at the helm.