Black and grey realism tattoo of a galleon under full sail above breaking waves, across a man's upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galleon and stormy waves on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A three-masted galleon with full sails sits on the sea, with birds and clouds above and breaking waves below. The linework is fine and the sails and hull are shaded with soft grey gradients for depth. The design wraps over the shoulder and upper arm, and the photo shows a torso with a checkered floor and red wall in the background.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Ship Sail Wave Cloud Bird Sea

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

The galleon had three masts when we bought it off a bankrupt pier show in Margate, and by the time Mother Hargreaves signed the tent over to the bailiffs it had lost two of them to damp and a Labrador. I was the one who painted its sails back. Grey, she insisted, never white. White reads like a wedding dress from the back rows, and nobody pays good money to watch a wedding dress go down with all hands.

Keep reading

Every evening at eight the lights went blue and the sea cloth rolled out across the sawdust, painted waves dragged along by pulleys that Dennis, our last rigger, swore would snap one day and take someone's head off. The galleon came in on its wheeled cradle, heeled over, and the crowd gasped the way crowds do when they know perfectly well they are safe. Then Tobias, our ringmaster, who had a moustache and a gambling problem in roughly equal measure, would shout that she was going under. She never did. We bowed anyway.

The last night we had the ground, the bailiffs' van was already parked by the gate. I climbed the rigging alone, the way I had at nine, and cut the lashings on the grey sails so they would hang loose. Dennis said canvas would only rot in a field. I said that was the wind's business now. Below me the tent sagged, the lights went out one by one, and the galleon stood on its cradle with nothing above it but bare spars, looking like a ship that had given up.

At dawn we rolled her out through the gate and into the empty car park behind the bingo hall. I stood on the deck and watched the wind find the loose canvas. It filled the grey sails to full, and for one minute, with the painted gulls wheeling above us, the whole old thing looked exactly like it was going somewhere.