Traditional style anchor tattoo wrapped in rope on the top of a foot, with Roman numerals on the shank.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional anchor and rope on a foot

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A bold anchor with a coiled rope wrapped around its wooden stock, shown on the top of a foot against a white background. The outlines are heavy and black, with grey shading on the rope and reddish brown tones on the anchor's shank and stock. Roman numerals are set along the shank, and the anchor fills most of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad never danced, but every Saturday he stood at the rail of the Pavilion with his cap pushed back, watching the couples turn under the paper lanterns as if they were a tide table he could read. The band on Saltcombe pier played the same foxtrot twice an evening, and the floor smelled of Brasso and wet wool from the coats hung by the door.

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The night the Mary Ellen came in, a deckhand called Tobias Reeve asked me for a quickstep and talked the whole way round about the numbers stamped inside his sea chest. Five, four, fifteen. The fifth of April, 1915, the day his grandfather's boat was dragged off the Skerries by a fool who wouldn't let go of his anchor line. "You hold on to the thing that holds you," he said, and trod on my foot.

I told him it was a rotten reason to put ink on your skin, and he laughed so loudly the bandleader looked up and missed his cue.

He didn't come back the following Saturday. Dad took the lantern down from the rail and said nothing about it, and on the Monday the Mary Ellen went out with her chain running clean through the hawse. Tobias had left a coil of old rope on the cloakroom hook with a note tucked into it: Keep this dry. It's the part that does the holding. I still have it, stiff with salt, and some nights I wonder which of us he was talking about.

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