Colour tattoo of a teal and orange anchor wrapped in rope, with two birds and pink watercolour splashes, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour anchor with birds on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of an anchor with a coiled rope running around its shank, flanked by two birds that appear to be seagulls or similar. The anchor shaft and flukes are shaded in teal and blue with pale dotted highlights, while the crossbar and ring are rendered in orange and rust. Soft pink, purple and red washes spread behind the design, giving a loose, painterly composition on the skin.

Thigh Anchor Rope Bird Watercolour

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

The ferryman at Haldane Reach had one rule, older than the frontier posts painted on either bank. He carried anyone across the grey water who paid in salt, bread or a true story, and he never asked which side they had come from. His anchor hung from the bow on a coil of tarred rope, rust-red at the ring and blue-green where the sea had worn the shank.

Keep reading

One autumn a girl came down the slipway with a bundle wrapped in oilcloth and nothing else. The guards on the far bank had orders to turn back anyone without papers, and she had none. She sat on the stones while gulls gathered on the posts above her. When the ferryman asked what she could offer, she said her grandmother had crossed here as a child, hidden under a crate of herring, and had told her the ferry anchor was the one that held the boat through the great flood.

He did not remember the flood, but his father did, and his father had said the anchor was dropped in the middle of the channel that year so neither bank could claim the water. The ferryman looked at the girl for a long time. Then he untied the rope from the cleat, coiled it twice over his arm, and rowed her out until the anchor could go down into the silt at the centre of the river, where the frontier ran.

On the far bank the guards shouted, then fell silent, because the gulls had lifted off the posts and were wheeling low over the boat, crying as if they had been waiting all morning. The girl stepped onto the stones with her bundle. The ferryman took his salt and his story, and when he rowed home the gulls settled in a row on the crossbar of the nearest post, watching the anchor hold.