Traditional-style colour tattoo of a winged anchor with leaves and red shading on a man's upper arm and shoulder.

Winged anchor tattoo on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A winged anchor sits on the upper arm and shoulder, with a dark grey anchor shaft, a red and green-grey stock and curled wing shapes above it. Bold outlines and solid colour fills give it a classic traditional look, with soft red shading on the wings and a few green leaves and tendrils around the edges. The tattoo is centred on the arm against a white vest, with the background softly out of focus.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Anchor Wing Leaves Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Morwenna Lane dragged her anchor off Flamborough Head at four in the morning, and by five the whole watch knew we would be on the rocks unless somebody did something foolish. Bosun Pike did the foolish thing. He said the old anchor had flown before and would fly again, then went forward with a bowline and a bottle of rum for luck.

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I held the windlass brake while he worked at the fouled shackle, the sea coming green over the bow every fourth wave. His hands were raw from the cold and the red paint on the stock was flaking under his palms. Somewhere in the spray I could hear the cliff, that low grumbling a cliff makes when it is thinking about you.

The shackle gave with a crack like a rifle shot. The anchor dropped, bit into the sand thirty fathoms down, and held. The ship swung round slowly, her bow pointing back out to sea, and in the grey light the curled wings on the anchor's crown looked, for a moment, as if they might lift it clean off the bow and carry it home.

Pike sat down on the hatch cover, shaking, and pulled a sprig of hawthorn from the flukes where it had been tangled in the chain since Grimsby. Green leaves and a bramble tendril, still wet. 'Told you,' he said. We had never been near a hedgerow in our lives, and nobody had ever seen him ashore in the country, but I kept my mouth shut and let him have it.