Black and grey realism tattoo of a battleship among rolling waves and smoke, across the outer forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Battleship at sea on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large battleship with multiple gun turrets, a tall mast and a superstructure sits in profile across the forearm, rendered with soft grey shading. Dark, billowing clouds and churning water surround the ship, with pale white highlights on the sea spray. The composition is wide and horizontal, filling the length of the forearm with the ship and sea.

Realism Forearm Sea Wave Smoke Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, The boats came in three days late and the harbour master still won't say why. Your father is asleep in his chair with his boots on, which is how I know he has had a fright, because he never sleeps before the kettle's boiled.

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I'll tell it the way he told it to me, in pieces. They were out past the Smith Bank on the Tuesday, shooting nets in a sea like pewter, when the cloud came down low over the water and something grey came up out of it. A battleship, he says, bigger than the whole street, with three gun turrets fore and two aft and a mast like a steel church spire. She ran so close that the spray off her bow fell on the deck of the Good Intent like rain off a gutter. Smoke streamed off her funnels and lay flat along the waves, so that for an hour nobody could tell where the sea ended and the sky began.

Nobody on the boat spoke. Your father said the skipper took off his cap and held it against his chest, the way you'd stand at a funeral, and the lads didn't know whether to wave or hide below. The warship didn't stop. She just passed them, slow and proud, and her wash came rolling under the hull and lifted the net so hard the cork line snapped. When they hauled what was left, there were herring silver in the mesh, more than they'd seen all year, and a single brass button stamped with an anchor tangled in the twine.

He's put the button on the mantelpiece beside the clock. I'd like you to come home at Easter and look at it. Bring the little one. Tell me if the sea looked as grey to you as it did to him.

Your loving mother, Peg