Black and grey traditional tattoo of a pirate woman in a skull-and-crossbones tricorn hat with an eye patch, with a flower below, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pirate woman with eye patch on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pirate woman wears a tricorn hat decorated with a skull and crossbones, with an eye patch over one eye and hoop earrings. Bold black outlines and solid black fills define the hat, hair and eye patch, while grey shading models the face and leaves. A flower sits beneath her, and the design fills the inner forearm against a wooden floor.

Traditional Forearm Pirate Woman Skull Crossbones Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hat had belonged to Captain Josiah Crane for eleven years, and he never let anyone else touch it, so when the fever took him off Tortuga the crew assumed it would go over the side with him. Instead Mags Oddie, who had mended every sail on the Lantern Wren since she was twelve, picked it up from the deck and set it on her own head before the bosun could object.

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Nobody argued much. The skull stitched on the front had a grin that made grown men cross themselves, but Mags only tugged the brim low and said the Wren needed a captain who could read a chart without squinting. She had lost the left eye by then, to a block that snapped loose in a squall off the Azores. She kept the patch black, cut from a mourning shawl she had taken off a dockhand's widow for the price of a bottle, and the crew swore it made her look like the sea had winked at them.

The trouble came in spring. A Spanish galleon, low in the water with silver, crossed the Wren's bow at dawn, and the gunners were already reaching for their linstocks. Mags stood at the wheel with her gold hoops catching the light and ordered the yellow flag run up instead. She sailed alongside close enough to hear the other captain's sermon die in his throat, then called across that she was collecting the tithe owed to the sea and would take it in cargo or in courtesy.

They came home with half the silver and all of the captain's pride. Years later, when the Wren rotted at her moorings in Bristol, people still asked why her flag bore no crossbones. Mags always said the bones were for men who came aboard ready to die. She preferred the ones who came aboard ready to take orders from a woman who could still see the horizon.