Black and grey sailing ship and skull tattoo running down an upper arm, with a pink-washed compass rose on the shoulder.

Compass rose and sailing ship on shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large compass rose sits on the shoulder, with a pink wash behind it and a purple fleur-de-lis at the top, while a detailed black and grey sailing ship with furled sails runs down the upper arm. Below the ship, a skull is shaded into rolling waves, and the sea and sky are rendered in soft grey tones. The composition wraps around the arm, with the compass letters and dotted rings adding a fine, precise linework to the shoulder.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Compass rose Sailing ship Skull Wave Fleur-de-lis Sail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had redrawn the same compass rose so often that the ink had worn a pale ring into the vellum. The ship came into Carrow Haven on the ebb with her sails furled tight and her captain shouting for a pilot, and Anselm, who kept the chart room at the foot of the abbey steps, was the only man in the cove who could still read the old roses. He rowed out in the grey light with a lamp, a pot of blue ink and a needle.

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The captain, a broad man called Tobiah Crane, had sailed by a copy made twenty years before. Its north point bore a fleur-de-lis, the lily of Saint Brendan's, and the dotted rings were pricked so a helmsman could feel his bearings in the dark. Someone had smudged the lower arm where the south star should have been, and Crane's ship had nearly gone onto the Widow's Teeth. Anselm laid the vellum flat on the binnacle, traced the lines again, and found an old monk's mark hidden in the wave-line beneath the ship: a small skull, shaded so faint it looked like foam.

"That is a warning," Crane said, peering over his shoulder.

"It is a fool's joke," Anselm said. "Brother Ambrose had a sense of humour and a poor eye for water." He worked the skull into a crest of spray, then drew a second line of waves over it, so that any sailor who looked closely would find only sea. Crane paid him in salt pork and a silver penny with a hole through it.

When the ship slipped out on the next tide, Anselm climbed back up the steps and hung the chart in the chapter house, where the fleur-de-lis caught the morning sun and pointed, for once, exactly north.