Full colour traditional tattoo of a gold anchor with chain, a silver USN lettering and a naval emblem over an American flag on the upper arm.

US Navy anchor over American flag

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo shows a gold anchor wrapped in chain, with a silver USN lettering and a naval emblem across the top, set against a stars and stripes flag in blue, red and white. The linework is bold and dark, with flat colour fills and soft shading on the anchor and letters. The design fills the frame, with the dates 1992 and 2014 printed in a block typeface along the bottom.

Traditional Upper arm Anchor Chain American flag Star Stripe Lettering Date

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor on the barge Gwendolen had lain in the mud of the Lathe so long that the river had grown a beard of weed on its flukes. Every spring the water came up brown and fast, and every spring the bargemen said the same thing over their tea: the chain would hold, because the chain had never been asked to do anything else.

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The year the weir broke, a girl called Nell Ashby came down the towpath with a lantern and a canvas bag of her father's tools. Her father had been a smith in the town above the lock, and he had forged that chain link by link, each one stamped with a letter so a man could read the length of it in the dark. She asked the bargemen to lower the anchor. They laughed at her. She told them the flood would carry the barge to the sea if they did not, and she climbed down onto the wet stern and began filing the rust from the shackle.

She worked until the lantern guttered. Under the grime she found the stamps, U, S, N, and below them a small silver star, the mark her father put on anything he meant to last. When the water rose at midnight the barge swung once, then twice, and the flukes bit into the clay below the bend. The chain sang taut across the gunwale. Nobody slept. At dawn the Gwendolen still sat where she had been moored, and the river went past her, grumbling, towards the sea.

Nell never asked for thanks. Years later, when the wheelhouse flag had faded to pink and cream, the skipper's grandson still checked every link before the spring water came, and he always ran his thumb over the little silver star first.