Colour tattoo of a black outlined anchor wrapped in rope, set over pink, purple, blue and green watercolour splashes on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour anchor with rope on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A black outlined anchor with a coiled rope runs vertically through the centre of the design. Behind it, loose watercolour washes in pink, purple, blue, green and yellow spread outwards and drip below the anchor's flukes. The linework is crisp and even, and the soft colour fields contrast with the solid black outline.

Calf Anchor Rope Watercolour Splash

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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 paint tins have rolled into the scuppers again, and you are on your knees in a puddle of rose madder while Mr Pardoe bellows from the wheelhouse that the pumps will not wait for anybody's sketchbook. You stuff the tin under your jersey, the way you would a cat, and climb the ladder to the forecastle head, where the anchor chain runs out through the hawse pipe with a noise like a church bell falling down stairs.

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Eleven weeks out of Avonmouth, the ship has become a small grey town with one street. You have been painting the anchor every evening since Freetown, the same black outline you traced from a chandler's almanac, the same rope coiling round the shank. Mr Pardoe says a deckhand should draw ropes, not wash them. But the sea off the Cape is a sheet of pewter and the sky above it bleeds every colour you own, so you keep dabbing cobalt into the gaps between the lines and letting the wet paper do as it pleases.

The storm comes off the Agulhas bank on a Tuesday. You are lashed to the rail with your brushes in a canvas bag when the bow lifts and the anchor, hanging loose at the cathead, swings out over the water and back. Something gives. The chain runs free, the pink and violet of your half-dried washes smear across the deck planking, and the old anchor goes down into thousands of fathoms with a sound you feel in your back teeth.

Afterwards, nobody remembers the storm. They remember the deck, which the carpenter scrubbed twice and never quite got clean. Under the grey paint the stain is still there, a splash of violet, a green like shallow water over sand. Mr Pardoe stands over it at dawn, looks at you for a long while, and says the ship will need a new anchor at Durban. Then, almost gently, he holds out his hand for the paint tin.