Black line drawing of a cartoon captain in a rowing boat on waves, with lettering around a circular rope border, shown as a tattoo design.

Cartoon captain rowing a boat with lettering

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn flash design of a cartoon sea captain in a rowing boat, both arms raised and one hand showing a middle finger, with an oar dipping into choppy waves. Lettering curves around the top and bottom of a circle framed by a rope-style border, and a pennant flies from a pole on the right. Drawn in black ink on cream paper with even linework, hatched wave patterns and no colour.

Boat Wave Flag Anchor Lettering Cartoon character

Find an artist for this

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

Dennis Protheroe had brought the Year Four songbook to the reunion, a tatty thing with the corners gone soft, and he held it open by the buffet as though it were evidence. "Row, row, row your boat," he read aloud to Maureen Pilling, who had once bitten him during a PE lesson and never apologised. "Gently down the stream."

Keep reading

Maureen didn't take the book. She was watching the far end of the function room, where Gary Ashdown, now a harbour master in Whitby with a tan like scaffolding, was telling a story about a dinghy he had sunk in 1997. Nobody had believed that tale at school either. Above the bar, the old headmistress's portrait wore the same expression she had worn at assembly, the one that said the sea was not going to forgive anybody.

"He still owes me four pounds for a bus fare," Maureen said. Dennis laughed, then stopped, because Gary had spotted them and was raising both hands in mock surrender, the way he had when a rounders ball went over the fence and into Mr Hebden's greenhouse. Gary crossed the room with a paper cup of orange squash and set it down between them like a peace offering. "Still rowing, then?" he asked. "Not me. I'm the captain now."

Maureen took the cup. Outside, the car park lights flickered over wet tarmac, and the nursery rhyme looped in Dennis's head the way it always had, the boat going nowhere, the oar dipping and dipping. Maureen raised her cup to Gary, held her other hand high in a gesture that needed no explaining, and walked back to the buffet. The songbook stayed open on the sausage rolls until a caretaker closed it for her.