Colour tattoo of a crowned creature sailing a boat under a crescent moon and stars, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Crowned creature in a sailboat on the upper back

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A creature wearing a crown sits in a wooden sailboat with a large yellow sail and pennant flags, with the word MAX lettered on the hull. A crescent moon and small stars sit to the left and right, and blue and brown waves curl along the bottom. Bold black outlines are filled with soft yellow, orange, brown and blue shading, set centrally on the upper back.

Back Sailboat Creature Crown Moon Star Wave Sail Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you dare touch that rope, the lot of you,' Mrs Ottoline Price shouted from the slipway, though nobody on the quay had laid a finger on anything. The creature in the crown had simply climbed into the little boat with MAX scratched on its hull, sat down on the thwart as if it owned the harbour, and was waiting for the wind to make up its mind.

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Nobody on Cullen Quay saw it arrive. It came in one October with the fog, a wild-haired fellow with a face like a tired ewe and a paper crown he had pressed flat under his ears. His sail was cut from an old lampshade, and his two pennants were strips of a bedsheet that had blown off somebody's washing line in Peterhead. He tied up at the fish market and asked, very politely, whether anyone had seen the moon lately, because he had mislaid her somewhere between here and the Dogger Bank.

Old Dessie Mackay, who had mended nets for forty years, said the moon was up behind the lighthouse where she always was, and the creature wept with relief into his own sleeve. He stayed the winter. He taught the children to tie a bowline and the gulls to fetch his tea, and each night he rowed out past the breakwater to gather the stars that had fallen into the water, hauling them up in a net and tipping them into a tin bucket.

In March the bucket was found empty and the boat was drifting, its sail slack and its crown caught on the rudder. Dessie pulled it in and found a small crescent of orange paper pinned to the thwart, with a note in careful capitals: TELL THE MOON I WENT LOOKING FOR HER. The stars were still out that night, and they sat very low over the water, as if waiting for somebody to row back and count them.