Colour tattoo sleeve on a man's forearm and upper arm, showing clouds and what looks like ship rigging in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colour sleeve with ship and clouds on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A man in a red gingham shirt, grey tie and suspenders crosses his arms, with a full-colour tattoo sleeve visible on his right forearm and extending up toward the elbow. The design appears to include clouds and a structure resembling a ship's rigging or mast, with bold outlines and shading in greens, reds, yellows and purples. The face is out of frame, and the tattoo fills the left side of the composition against a white brick wall.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, The fair reached Scarborough on Tuesday and the wind has not let up since. Mr Ashby's big top took a beating on the first night, and he has sworn at the canvas in three languages, two of them invented. I have spent most of the week up the crane arm that serves us as a mast, checking the guy wires for the swing boat, because a sailor who cannot climb is only a man with a rope.

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The squall off Finisterre looked like this too. The clouds came over the Marigold in a bank the colour of a bruise, green at the edges where the light got through, and Captain Hollis had every hand aloft before the first gust hit. I was nineteen and went up the ratlines so fast I forgot to be afraid until I was sitting on the yard with the sail cracking beneath me like a rifle shot. Hollis said afterwards that the ship knew the way home better than any of us, and I believed him for longer than I ought to.

Last night a girl of about six came to the crane while I was splicing. She asked whether the clouds would take the top of the crane away. I told her clouds only ever take what they can carry, and that the wires were stronger than they looked. She gave me a pressed carnation from the tea tent and ran off to tell her mother I was not a ghost.

I'll post this from Whitby if the van comes past. Keep the lamp lit on the back step for me. The wind is backing round to the south now, and when it does I'll climb down and walk home along the coast road with the rigging still humming in my ears.

Yours, Tom

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