Eagle, ship and LOYALTY banner torso design

Traditional · Chest · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a torso and clasped hands, with a large tattoo design across the chest and abdomen. The design centres on a spread-winged eagle above a LOYALTY banner, with a ship, flags, a skull and a rose-like motif around it. The linework is fine and detailed, with no shading or colour, and the design fills the frame within a border of small stars.

Traditional Chest Eagle Ship Banner Skull Flag Rose Star Torso

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Glad Tidings had been three days hove-to off the Dogger when Jonah Pask finally admitted he could no longer read the chart. His eyes had gone to milk over the winter, and the pencilled soundings swam like minnows under his thumb. Ruth Carew took the brass dividers from his fist without a word and bent over the table in the cramped cuddy, her plait dripping on the oilcloth.

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Nobody aboard had ever thought of her as anything but the cook's girl. She could gut a cod in four strokes and splice a rope so tight the bosun swore it would outlast the hull, but navigation was a man's business, or so the owners said when they signed her papers. Ruth had learned it from Jonah's books at night, by the lamp, with the same stubbornness she used on the rigging. Loyalty, the men called it, when she stayed aboard through the fever year while her own mother lay sick in Hull.

By morning the wind had backed to the north-east and the mainsail hung in ribbons. Ruth went aloft herself with the ensign in a canvas bag tied at her waist, and nailed the old flag to the stump of the mizzen so the men below could see it through the spray. They raised the Spurn light by dusk, a small yellow eye in the rain.

Jonah died a fortnight later, peaceful in his bunk, and the owners wrote asking whether the chart books were still in good order. Ruth kept them on the shelf above her bed, their spines worn pale from handling, and she checked every sounding herself.