Traditional style tattoos on both legs showing sailing ships, red roses, a mermaid, a fish and anchors with rope, on thighs, calves and ankles.

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Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

Two legs are covered from thigh to ankle with mirrored traditional tattoos of sailing ships with red flags, red roses on teal, and anchors joined by a rope. The left calf shows a red-haired mermaid and the right calf a green fish with a partly hidden figure. The bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour of red, green, teal and yellow ink are typical of the traditional style, with the ships in mostly grey shading.

Traditional Thigh Calf Ankle Ship Sailing ship Rose Mermaid Fish Anchor Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rope had been paying out for three days before Nell Corrie thought to ask why the Sweet Hester kept her red ensign flying in a flat calm. Her brother Tom leaned on the rail with a bottle of cold tea and said nothing, which was how she knew something was wrong. The two ships had been built that spring in the same yard at Porthlevan, from the same seasoned oak, and the same old carpenter had cut their knees and ribs. Only their figureheads told them apart: a green-scaled mermaid on the Sweet Hester, and on the Constant Jane a fish with a lantern jaw and a patient eye.

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The Constant Jane had gone out past the bar in March with eleven hands and come back in April with no anchor and no crew, only a length of tarred hemp trailing from her bow, cut clean. The harbourmaster called it a squall and a bad splice. Nell called it nonsense, because she had been taught the sailor's knot their father used, the one that bites down harder the more a rope is pulled, and she had seen that knot on the cut end herself.

On the fourth morning she rowed out alone and went down along the rope with a lamp and a knife. It ran from the buoy with the red rose painted on it, down through the green water, to an anchor sitting in the sand. Someone had tied the other end around its shank with that same knot, pulled tight, and left a folded oilskin tucked under the stock. Inside was a single line in her father's square hand: hold the line, Nell, and the tide will bring them home.

She held it. By noon the Constant Jane was riding up over the bar on the flood, her sails grey and torn, the rope singing taut between the two ships like a plucked string.