Colour traditional-style tattoo of an anchor wrapped in rope with a red heart on the shank, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional anchor with heart on upper back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A bold anchor sits centrally on the upper back, with a golden rope coiled around the shank and a red heart pinned over it. The anchor has dark blue-grey shading with solid black outlines, and its flukes have red tips. Colour is limited to red, yellow, pink and blue-grey against the skin, with the design filling most of the frame.

Traditional Back Anchor Rope Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways off the estuary since six, and by half eight the cobbles outside the fish hall ran like a gutter. Most of the stalls had shut. I kept mine open out of spite, with a tarpaulin pegged over the rope coils and my hands going blue on the cutting knife.

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The woman arrived just as the bell went for the last tide. She wore a yellow sou'wester that had seen better decades and asked for three fathoms of tarred hemp, no nylon, no exceptions. I asked what she wanted it for. She said her father used to moor a skiff off the Humber steps, the skiff had gone down in the spring, and she wanted to tie something of his properly before the next blow.

I cut her the rope. Her fingers were quick with the knot she chose, a round turn and two half hitches, and she pulled it tight against the cold while I watched. Nobody ties that knot anymore. I told her so, and she gave a short bark of a laugh and said her father had told her the same thing about everything.

She paid from a jam jar of coppers. As she walked off into the wet with the coil over her shoulder, I saw the red enamel heart pinned to her lapel, dented at one edge. My own father never once said a kind word in forty years of trading, yet he kept a heart-shaped tin of barley sugar in every drawer he owned, and I stood there in the rain for a long time, thinking about why.