Black and grey realism leg sleeve with roses, an animal portrait and script lettering across the thigh and calf.

Black and grey leg sleeve with roses and script

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A person lies with their legs raised against a wooden pier and a blue sea and sky. Both legs are covered in a full sleeve of black and grey tattoos, with roses, an animal portrait, a compass motif and lines of script. The shading is soft and detailed, and the design wraps around the thigh and down towards the calf.

Realism Lettering Thigh Calf Rose Flower Script Compass Animal Sleeve

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart had been spoiled by the time the ink dried, which my mother said was the sea's way of signing its work. I had drawn the compass rose in the corner the way Mr Abel taught me at the Whitby school, eight points and a fleur for north, but rain came through the loft window and bled the roses into the margin. I left them. A chart with a flaw in it is at least honest about being a chart.

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The figurehead came down from the Eliza Jane in March, a carved mare with her mane lifted as if into a gale, and the yard boy sold me the offcut for a shilling because I asked him nicely. I carried it home under my coat. My brother Tom says I have always been soft on horses and hard on tide tables, and he is not wrong. Each evening I copied the bearings and soundings from the ship's log in a hand so neat the clerk complained it looked like print.

On the last Sunday of April the Eliza Jane came in without her master. The mate carried the log up the harbour steps himself and put it in my hands, open at a page where someone had written the same line four times: hold her north, hold her north, hold her north. The compass had been true. It was the man who had wandered, and we never learned where.

I pinned the spoiled chart above the desk and wrote the bearings beneath it in my own hand, the way you would sign a letter to someone who might still be out there. Tom says it is morbid. I say it is only accurate. Every morning I check the roses against true north and find them, as ever, a little off, and every morning I leave them be.