Black and grey traditional-style anchor tattoo with a chain, wings and the letters USN above it, on a lower leg.

USN anchor tattoo on a lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A large anchor with a chain wrapped around the shank sits beneath the letters USN, with a scroll banner and the number 64 below. The linework is bold and dark, with grey shading on the shank and the chain. The tattoo is in black and grey ink, centred on the leg with plain skin and body hair around it.

Traditional Lettering Calf Anchor Chain Wing Banner Lettering Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chain came off the Bramble at ten past two, and by then the rain had turned the quay to black glass. Mo Okafor held the lamp while I shackled the second link, swearing at the cold. Nobody on the Tyne had ever told the anchor it was wanted elsewhere, so it groaned up out of the water like a drowned man reluctant to be found.

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We had a rule on that crew: you did not name the anchor, but you counted its links out loud. Sixty-four of them, Mo said, the same as the year the Bramble was launched, and the number was stamped on the bow in letters nobody could read any more. I counted them anyway, under my breath, while the winch ground and the wet steel shrugged against the dock wall.

At the seventieth I stopped. Not because of the number. A man in a long coat was standing under the crane light with his hands in his pockets, watching us the way you watch a tide you already know will not turn. He did not speak. He looked at the chain, then at the bare hook on the quay where the old anchor used to hang, and nodded once, as if we had finally done something right.

When we had it cleared he was gone, and the rain had washed the chalk marks off the bollard. Mo asked who he was. I told him I did not know. Later, in the warm, I found one wet link tangled in my glove, and the number scratched into it was 64, though I had counted seventy.