Traditional style tattoo on an upper arm showing a green bottle with a red stag skull label, surrounded by grey roses, green leaves and a yellow banner.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green bottle and grey roses on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A green glass bottle with a red label showing a stag skull sits at the centre of the design, framed by three grey roses with orange-tipped petals and green leaves. A tan banner with dark lines runs across the lower part of the arm. The bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour fills are typical of American traditional work, and the image is a close, well-lit shot of the upper arm.

Traditional Upper arm Bottle Rose Banner Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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We are three weeks out of Valparaíso and Mr Pardoe has finally stopped pretending he doesn't have the bottle. You'll remember the green one from the chandlery on Redcliffe Hill, the one with the stag skull on the red label that he swore was for his chest. He kept it in his locker wrapped in a darned stocking, and on Tuesday the cook went looking for the spare lamp oil and found the stocking stuffed with dried rose petals instead, grey at the edges, their tips still orange like they'd been dipped in a sunset.

The bosun blamed the Dutchman, who blamed the rats, and for a day the whole forecastle ran about like hens. Then Pardoe came up on deck at the change of watch with the bottle in both hands and the cork already out. I thought he meant to drink it. Instead he held it up to the lamp, and the light came through the green glass the way it does through the church windows at home, and he said, quite plainly, that his wife had filled it with tea the week he sailed, to see if he'd notice. He hadn't noticed. He'd been drinking the tea for four months and calling it medicine.

We laughed until the mate sent us below. I'm writing because I can't stop thinking about him at the rail, with the wind pulling at the strip of old sailcloth he'd tied round the neck like a bandage. He untied it, folded it into a neat tan band, and buckled it round the bottle the way you'd bind a broken oar.

He dropped it over the stern at dawn. I watched it bob off towards the sun, stag and roses winking, until it was only a green spark on the swell. Mind you write back and tell me the roses in the back garden have come up. I should like to think something is growing without us.

Your loving brother, Tom