Black ink finger tattoos on a clenched hand showing a flower, a sailing ship, a ship's wheel, a palm tree and crossed arrows in a simple traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Nautical finger tattoos on a fist

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Five small tattoos sit across the fingers of a clenched hand, showing a flower, a sailing ship, a ship's wheel, a palm tree and crossed arrows. The designs use bold, even black outlines with little or no shading, and the set has a consistent nautical theme. The photograph is shot close up against a dark top, with the tattoos sharp and centred in the frame.

Traditional Hand Flower Ship Ship's wheel Palm tree Arrow Nautical Finger tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spokes of the wheel had split off Flores, and by the Tuesday watch Dessa Marr was on her knees in the bosun's locker with a tin of linseed oil and a borrowed awl. Nobody asked her why she bothered. The Harriet Lowe was carrying coal to Bridgwater, and the owners in Bristol had already sold her to a man in Lagos, so the whole crew had written her off as cargo.

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She worked the grain out with her thumbs, thinking about the palm tree she had seen on Antigua the summer she was nineteen, a single tree leaning over grey sand as if someone had told it to wait. She had cut her initials under it with a pocket knife. A boy from the cargo gang had cut a pair of crossed arrows beside them and swore they would bring luck. Neither of them had come back for the other, and the arrows were the only part of that summer she still believed in.

When the wheel was whole she lashed it to the binnacle and turned it once. The rudder answered with a groan that travelled down through the deck into her knees. The captain came up the companionway at a run, stood beside her for a long while looking at the smoothed grain, and then said the owners would never notice a thing like that.

"They won't," Dessa said. "It isn't for them." She took the awl and, beneath the little flower she had scratched into the rail that morning, cut a ship under full sail, then sat back on her heels as the Harriet Lowe swung her bows out past the headland into the open grey.