Black and grey traditional style tattoos on three fingers of a hand: an anchor, a sailing ship and a ship's wheel, with the ship placed on the middle finger.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor, sailing ship and ship's wheel on fingers

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Three small nautical tattoos sit across the index, middle and ring fingers of a hand, with an anchor on the index finger, a sailing ship with billowing sails on the middle finger and a ship's wheel on the ring finger. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with the ship shaded using stippled and textured areas for depth. The tattoos are entirely black and grey, set against pale skin and a white cloth, and the composition is shot straight on so all three designs are clearly visible.

Traditional Hand Anchor Ship Sailing ship Ship's wheel Nautical Finger Sail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The schooner Marigold was three weeks out of Grimsby when the cook lost his last tooth to a bad herring, and so the job of marking the crew fell to Jem Radley. Nobody else aboard could keep a line straight with a sailmaker's needle, so the mate handed him a pot of lamp soot, a bent pin and a rag, and told him to make something of himself before the wind turned.

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He started with the anchor because it was the simplest thing to get right. The ship came second, the one with its sails full of wind that he'd watched every morning from the foredeck, and he pricked it out slowly while the swell lifted the boat and let it fall. The wheel he saved for last, because the old bosun said a man should always finish with the thing that steers him.

By the time they raised the Humber the pin had worn blunt and the soot had sunk in past the skin. The captain looked at the three small marks, laughed until he coughed, then paid Jem a shilling and a tot of rum to keep quiet about it.

Jem sold the Marigold a year later and took a berth on a collier out of Hull. Every morning he lifted his hand to the rope and the tiller and the sheet, and every morning the wheel turned under his fingers the way the bosun had promised it would, true enough to bring him home.