Realism style black and grey tattoo of a winged anchor badge with a striped shield, placed centrally on the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged anchor badge on the torso

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed winged badge sits centrally on the skin, with a small anchor at the top and a striped shield in the middle. The wings are shaded with soft grey gradients and fine feather detail, and the shield has crisp vertical stripes. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the tattoo fills the width of the frame against a plain, softly lit background.

Realism Chest Wing Anchor Shield Badge Stripe

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 starter cord snapped on the third pull, the way it always did when the wind came off the Minch, and Ada Lunan swore at the engine in the same flat voice her father had used on his boats. Ewan Rusk stood on the float with his cap in his hand, watching her knuckles bleed onto the cowling. "It'll go," she said. "It always goes in the end."

Keep reading

The trawler *Mairi Dhu* had missed her tide at the Sgeir, and by four o'clock the whole harbour was on the slipway with flasks and binoculars. Ewan took the amphibian out into the grey with two crewmen's names written on a card in his breast pocket. Ada kept the radio on the bench beside her and listened to the static fill up with nothing, hour after hour, until the light went and the lamp on the breakwater came on by itself.

They came back at midnight, all three trawlermen and Ewan, soaked to the skin and grinning like fools. Before he went up the road to his mother's, he pressed a small brass badge into her palm, its wings spread and a tiny anchor riding in the middle of a striped shield. "Keep it on the bench," he said. "Something to look at while you swear at that engine."

She pinned it to the strap of her overalls that winter. Some mornings she counted the stripes on the shield while the cord caught and the propeller turned over, one, two, all the way down to the bottom bar, and then she pulled again.