Traditional style forearm tattoo of a red and grey anchor wrapped in banners reading Hold Fast, 604 and In Christ, with blue roses.

Traditional anchor and roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm tattoo showing an anchor wrapped with banners that read HOLD FAST, 604 and IN CHRIST, with a blade crossing the shank. Two blue roses with red and yellow accents sit at the top and bottom of the design. Bold black outlines and solid fills with some shading give the piece a classic American traditional look, in saturated red, yellow, blue and green on a plain background.

Traditional Forearm Anchor Rose Banner Lettering Blade Scripture

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, the kettle's only just gone off, and you'll hear this one properly or not at all. Your grandad was sixteen the winter the wind tore the cranes loose on Gallows Quay, and he was standing on the wet concrete when the chain snapped. Everybody else ran for the sheds. He didn't. He got his shoulder under the iron and held it while the men shouted at him to let go, and the cold came up through his boots like something alive.

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We lived on the top floor of Harrow Point, flat 604, and the lift had been broken since before your mum was born. Every night he came up those stairs with his lungs full of diesel and said the same thing to the front door before he unlocked it. Hold fast. Then he'd laugh, because it sounded daft to say to a door, and I'd tell him the door had heard worse from the men on the landing. He never once told me what it was he thought he was holding.

The knife on his arm is the one that cut the rope the day the hawser went, the one a fitter called Dessie pulled from his belt to free the boy who'd been caught under it. Grandad kept the blade's shape in his head for sixty years and never kept the knife. He said the holding was the part that mattered, and the rest was just paperwork.

So when the lift stuck between floors last Tuesday and you started crying, I didn't tell you to be brave. I told you what he'd have said. Put your hand on the rail, count the lights going past the window, and hold fast. You're nearly home, love. Six hundred and four is just up there, round the next bend.