Traditional-style flash design of a bearded sailor in a knitted cap smoking a pipe, framed by rope, with an anchor, laurel leaves and a red flower below.

Bearded sailor with pipe and anchor

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A bold traditional flash drawing of a bearded sailor in profile, wearing a knitted cap and smoking a pipe, with wisps of smoke curling upward. He is framed by a twisted rope circle with a sea and wave background, and an anchor with laurel leaves and a red flower sits across the bottom. The bold black outlines are filled with warm flesh tones, greens, reds and ochre, on a cream background.

Traditional Sailor Beard Pipe Smoke Rope Anchor Laurel Flower Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor had been down three days when Mercy Ashdown finally asked the question that had sat in her mouth since Liverpool. Sid Tarrant didn't look round. He tapped his pipe against the rail and watched the grey water heave under the bow of the Brightwater as if it owed him money.

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'You never go ashore,' she said. 'Every port, you stay aboard and splice rope nobody asked you to splice.' He struck a match, cupped it against the wind off the Minch and drew until the bowl glowed. 'Rope doesn't ask for much,' he said at last.

She knew the answer was in the locker under his bunk, where a coil of old manila lay wrapped in oilcloth. Each splice had a name worked into the eye of it in tarred thread. Danny Tarrant had gone over the side off Cape Wrath the winter he was nineteen, and Sid had been carrying that rope ever since, mending it each time it frayed, as though a good enough knot might bring a boy back up through the water.

The gale came in at four bells. The cable parted with a crack like a rifle shot and the ship began to drag toward the skerries, and Sid was already forward with a coil over his shoulder, bellowing at Mercy to get the lamp lit. He made the chain fast to the spare anchor with a bowline that would have shamed a Shetland boatman, then hauled the old manila round the bitts until his palms bled. The Brightwater held. The rocks stayed where they were.

At first light the sea lay down like a tired dog. Mercy found him at the rail, the pipe gone cold between his teeth, watching a thread of smoke climb from the chimneys of Stornoway. 'Next port,' he said, 'I'll post a letter to Danny's mother.' He struck another match. 'Then I'll go ashore and buy some proper rope.'