Traditional flash design of a one pint bottle holding two sailing ships, with a banner reading A Sailor's Grave over a skull and crossbones, flanked by red stars and green leaves.

Bottle with ships and a sailor's grave banner

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A bottle sits upright at the centre, with a label reading ONE PINT and a scene of two sailing ships on rough sea inside it. A cream banner wraps around the lower bottle with the words A Sailor's Grave, and a skull with crossbones sits below it. Bold black outlines, flat fills and red and green accents appear on a cream background, with two small red stars and leaves at the sides.

Traditional Bottle Ship Sailing ship Sea Banner Skull Crossbones Star Leaves Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ned Harrow had carved ships into bottles for the travelling fairs since the winter his knees gave out on the trawlers, and by the second week of September the stall smelled of varnish and fried dough from the tent next door. A man in a salt-stained coat leaned on the counter one evening and asked for a bottle labelled One Pint, with two ships inside and a grave written across the banner. 'Not a joke,' he said. 'I want it done properly.'

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Ned set down his brush. Nobody had ever asked him for the grave before. Most customers wanted a fleet or a lighthouse. He asked where the ships should be sailing, and the man said they should be running before a squall, one on the other's heels, because that was how his father had always told it: the Constance chased the Mary Ann out of Hull for thirty years and never once caught her.

Ned worked through the night with the lamp hung on a nail and the big wheel groaning outside in the dark. He rigged the masts with thread no thicker than a hair, dipped the sails in cream, and laid a red flare of sunset behind them. When he tilted the bottle to the light, the two ships seemed to lean into the same wind.

At dawn the man came back, paid in coppers counted twice, and held the bottle up to his eye for a long time. 'She'd have liked the red,' he said, and went off down the muddy lane toward the gate. Ned corked the bottle, wrapped it in a rag and set it on the shelf beside the others, where the ships would go on not catching each other.