Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bearded man profile with roses and rope

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil and ink drawing on paper of a man in profile with a full moustache, swept-back hair and a pipe at his mouth. Rope borders the head, and large layered roses and leaves fill the lower part of the composition. The design uses bold black outlines, fine hatching and stippled dots, with no colour.

Neo-trad Man Beard Moustache Pipe Rose Flower Rope Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rope had been coiled wrong for three days, and Mercy Oakes was not going to be the one to tell the bosun. She sat on the forecastle hatch with a half-unravelled hawser across her knees, picking out the kinks with a marlinspike while the Lydia Vane shouldered through the grey swell south of the Horn.

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Her uncle Tobias had taught her knots at six, in a Bristol rope walk that smelled of tar and wet hemp. He had also taught her that a man who smoked a pipe on deck was either thinking or hiding, and that you could tell which by how he held the stem. Tobias held his like a question. Mr Feld, the old steward, held his like a grudge. It was Feld who had carried roses aboard at Valparaiso in a clay pot wrapped in sacking, because he said a ship without something living on it was only a coffin with sails.

The roses died within a fortnight of the cold. Mercy pressed the last bloom between two pages of the log and kept it in her oilskin pocket. On the night the main halyard finally parted, she lashed herself to the mast with a good length of line and crawled forward through the spray. The lantern found the broken end, and she saw that the strands had been spliced back in the old way, tucked tight, with a scrap of red thread worked into the lay so it would show. Feld had been up there alone, weeks ago, when nobody was watching. The splice held. She pulled a small pinch of pipe ash from her cuff and let the wind take it over the rail.