Pencil flash sheet of traditional-style tattoo designs including a boxing glove, a swallow, a dagger, an anchor, an arrow and lettered banners.

Pencil flash sheet with boxing glove, swallow and banners

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black pencil drawing on a pale sheet showing a set of separate tattoo designs. Items include a boxing glove with the words Came Out Swinging, a banner reading Bury Me At Sea over a ship's wheel, a dagger with a ribbon, a swallow with a banner, a shovel signpost, an anchor with Don't Let Me Cave In, and a spear and arrow beside Fate Fell Short. The linework is shaded with greys and the composition places each design apart on the page.

Traditional Banner Ship's wheel Dagger Swallow Anchor Arrow Spear Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis had boxed welterweight before the sea got him, and he still stood like one on the heaving deck of the Marigold, feet apart, fists loose. Three weeks earlier the fish market lads had bet him he couldn't last three rounds with their champion on the quay. He lost a tooth in the second and kept his feet in the third, and that was the story he told whenever anyone asked why his old glove hung from the wheelhouse hook.

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The storm came up off Flamborough on the Sunday, the kind that turns the sky the colour of wet slate in the space of an afternoon. Skipper Hollis wrestled the wheel while the rest of us bailed, and when the mainspar cracked he bellowed that we'd be lucky to see the harbour wall by morning. Dennis just knotted a spare line round his waist and went forward along the bow. "Bury me at sea if it comes to it," he shouted, grinning like a fool, and nobody laughed, but every one of us heard him.

We raised the harbour lamp at dawn with a split hull and the wheel spoke bent like a nail. Dennis lay on the fish boxes with his eyes shut, soaked to the bone, and when the lifeboat crew hauled him up the slip he opened one eye and said fate had fallen short again. Nobody could tell whether he meant the storm or the bet.

We hauled the Marigold back into the water in April with a new spar, bright as a fresh tooth. Dennis rowed out first, the old glove knotted round his neck, and called back that the sea had never once landed a clean punch on him, though it had certainly tried.