Black tribal-style anchor design with ornamental swirls and sharp blade-like points, shown as a drawing with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal anchor design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black anchor with a ringed top, a central shaft and curved flukes at the base. The shaft and arms are decorated with interlocking swirls, spikes and filigree-like linework. The design is shown flat on a plain white background, centred and symmetrical.

Blackwork Anchor Swirl Ornament Tribal

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step there, where the mint has got over it. Now sit, on the bench, not the wall. The wall's for the lad who came back from Hull with his pockets full of gulls' eggs. That's the anchor you're looking at, lying in the rhubarb. Don't go pulling at it. It was there long before the rhubarb.

Keep reading

Old Tobias Pengelly carried it up the lane on a handcart the winter his brother's boat went down off the Lizard. The brother never came up at all. Tobias could not abide the sea after that and would not have it in his house, so he set the anchor in his garden the way a man might bury a grudge and wait to see whether it flowered. It never flowered. But the ivy found the swirls on its arms and climbed them like a stair, and by spring the whole thing was half green.

Every evening he walked out with his pipe and traced the spikes with one finger, the way you'd read a letter you already knew by heart. The curls, he said, were the tide running back on itself. The points were hooks that would not let go. The ring at the top was where a rope had wound round and round until somebody decided it was time to stop. Someone asked him once why he kept the thing at all. He said an anchor is only worth having once you've stopped wanting to be pulled anywhere.

The ivy has the whole shaft now. Last week the lad from Hull came asking if he could take it home, and I told him it was rooted, which is the only true thing I know about it. Pass me that jug, would you. The light's going, and the rhubarb will want its water before the frost.