Traditional style colour tattoo of the cartoon sailor Popeye holding a spinach can labelled SPINACH, on the forearm.

Popeye the Sailor on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cartoon sailor character, Popeye, squints and grips a green spinach can with a banner reading SPINACH, wearing a cap with a yellow button and smoking a red pipe. Bold black outlines frame solid areas of orange skin, green leaves, teal and grey clothing and small anchor motifs, with minimal shading. The design wraps diagonally across the forearm against a plain white background.

Traditional Forearm Sailor Pipe Anchor Cap Cartoon Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mother, the grain barge from Alexandria finally docked at Ostia, three weeks late, and I have never been so glad to see a mooring rope. Its mate is a man called Thessalos, broad as a bollard, who squints at the world as if the sun owes him money. Nobody mocks his jaw or his round cap any more, since the day a stevedore called him a dried fish and Thessalos lifted a full amphora one-handed and made the fellow apologise to it.

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His secret is no secret. Every dawn he thumps open a dented tin with a painted label, gulps the dark greens inside, and only then hauls the sail. Old Dorion swears the tins come from a one-eyed widow in the fish market, cooked in a copper pot with a sprig of anchor-wood. I have watched Thessalos eat them. He holds the tin like a cup of wine and grins at the gulls, and the gulls, I'll admit, seem to respect him.

Last night a trader from Carthage with rings on every finger tried to cheat us over the price of oil. When Thessalos told him so, the man drew a knife. Thessalos did not reach for his own blade. He drank a tin down with a small wheeze, took the trader's cart by its axle, and set the whole thing on the quay with the man still in it.

He then sat on a bollard, lit a clay pipe, and told me the sea looked calm enough for a nap. I am writing this from the same bollard. Your loving son, Kallias.