Black and grey flash design of a three-masted pirate ship with a skull flag, surrounded by pirate-themed lettering and a shark.

Pirate ship with lettering flash design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black ship illustration with full sails, a rigging and a small skull flag sits in the lower right of the composition. Surrounding it, phrases such as 'On a Great Grand Ship', 'we sail the sea' and 'Arr' are set in varied typefaces, with a shark and a fish. The linework is fine and hatched with solid black areas, and the design uses only black ink on a white background.

Lettering Sailing ship Shark Fish Lettering Sail Rigging Sea Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dunstan Holt chalked the galley slate before the Mary Greave cleared Avonmouth, and by the third week out he had rewritten it so often the men could recite it with their mouths full. On a great grand ship we sail the sea, till treasure we find, and steal with ease. The capitals swelled like sails in a good wind, the small words leaned as if they had been running from the weather, and a fish with too many teeth swam through the middle of it all. Nobody aboard could say who had taught him to letter like that. Nobody asked, because the bread was hot.

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Off Madeira a shark kept pace with them for two days, and the bosun swore it was reading over the bowsprit. The owner's clerk, Mr Pargeter, came aboard at Funchal with a ledger and a face like wet paper. He stood before the slate for a long time. 'This is not seamanship,' he said. 'It is poetry, and poetry is not in the articles.' Dunstan wiped his hands on his apron and said nothing, which was the first honest thing he had done since Bristol.

That night Pargeter was found on the foredeck with the skull flag draped over his shoulders, and he would not come down until the captain promised him a berth with a proper name. The rigging hummed. Dunstan slid a loaf onto the sill to cool. In the morning the clerk crept back to the galley, took the chalk from its ledge, and wrote in a hand far less lovely than his own one word at the very bottom of the slate: Arr.