I’ve tattooed hundreds of anchors over the years in various styles.
It is about as traditional American as you can get when it comes to theme.
When people think of traditional american style tattoos they often think navy and what is more associated with navy tattoos than the anchor?

The anchor as a tattoo holds a lot of symbolism. Back in the 80′s most of the time when I tattooed it on people it was to do with the sea, the navy, sailing, love of the water in general, sometimes a representation of being steady or holding ones feet on the ground, and as a plea to fate to keep one OK in the storms of life.
Every once and a great while it was associated with Christianity.

Nowadays it is usually just a design to the client. (looks cool)
Besides that it is almost always associated with Christianity. I rarely do an anchor tattoo for reasons associated with the sea.

Way back the early Christians would use the anchor as a disguised symbol for the cross. That in itself would make this a great tattoo for those wishing to express christian beliefs, but most of the time Christians nowadays use it to symbolize being anchored to Christ. It represents a stable grounding in their beliefs. It represents faith.
It can of course (and often does) mean different things to different Christians.

Hope, Safety, Fidelity, Stability, Security, Steadfastness, Salvation, Good Luck…

This particular design is a redraw of the very last anchor tattoo I did. It has the basic shape (there are only so many ways to draw an anchor) of the tattoo, but came out a tad longer in form. I also added the little stars (just for visual fun) and twisted the rope into a not overly obvious heart shaped ending. (that is a common rope theme, but usually done super obvious) The client got her tattoo on her lower tummy/pubic area. It was done in black & gray though… so has no relation to my blues project.

Not a sailor and not a Christian. Didn’t pick the design for just looks.
Hers had the cycles of the moons above and the rope twisted into an infinity knot.
The basic idea came to her after reading something online about how the lower crescent moon shaped part of an anchor symbolizes the female yin and the the vertical rod going into it symbolizes male yang. She thought it was sexually empowering.
I asked her about what the horizontal crossbar symbolized, and she said she didn’t know. Midway through her tattoo session she decided it must symbolize threesomes.
I was cool with that.
Still… not the most usual of meanings to attach to an anchor tattoo. At least not in my experience.