Traditional-style anchor with a red and gold stock and a DAD banner, printed as a design on a white ceramic mug.

Traditional anchor with DAD banner design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A bold traditional-style anchor with a red and orange stock, a grey shank and a green and yellow tip sits behind a tan banner reading DAD in red-shaded block lettering. The design is printed in black outline with flat, saturated colour on a plain white ceramic mug, shown from the side with the anchor filling the centre of the frame.

Traditional Anchor Banner Dad Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up on the third haul, green with weed and too heavy for four men, and Demetrios swore by Poseidon's beard that it was the stone my father had lost off Cape Malea. Nobody argued. We were a week out from Rhodes with a hold full of wine jars and a grudge against the weather, and a lost anchor was the least of our worries.

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I had the steering oar that season because my father could no longer grip it. He had taken a rope burn in the autumn that festered, and he sat now under the awning with his feet in a basin of brine, telling anyone who passed what they were doing wrong. When I carried the anchor up to him on the deck, he ran his thumb over the iron ring and said nothing for so long that the sailors went back to their pulleys.

Then he asked for a brush and the pot of red ochre he kept for marking jars. He painted the word on a strip of sailcloth, then drew a banner around it the way the Phoenician shipwrights mark their sacred timbers. The letters came out crooked, each one a little bent, like men leaning into a wind.

He tied the cloth to the shank with my own fishing line and told me to hang it where the sun would not reach. We sailed into Miletus three days later with the anchor lashed to the bow. I have it still, faded to the colour of old wine, and whenever I drop it over the side I hear him laughing from the awning, saying the sea always gives back what it cannot use.