Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile woman in bowler hat with ship wheel

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A bold-outlined drawing of a woman in profile wearing a black bowler hat decorated with a red flower and pearl-like dots. Behind her are blue waves, a red and yellow sunburst, green sprigs, a ship's wheel and the word HOLD. The flat, saturated colours are applied over a pale cream background.

Traditional Woman Profile Flower Ship wheel Wave Sun Leaves Sprig Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hatch cover was still warm from the afternoon sun when Nell Carrow heard the mate bellow from the foredeck, and she knew before she reached the rail that something in number three hold had come loose.

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She took the lamp down the ladder with her father's bowler buttoned tight over her ears, the red dahlia he had pinned to it still bright after forty years in a drawer. The air below smelt of split oranges from Seville. A tea chest had slid against the bulkhead and pinned old Tobias Dunn against a stack of sacking. He wasn't hurt, only furious, and swearing in the Cornish he had promised her mother he'd stop using.

"Get me up," he said, "and don't look at the wheel." She looked anyway. Through the square of the hatch she could see the ship's wheel lashed to its brass rim, spokes worn pale by hands that had steered to Lisbon and back. Nobody was at it. The fog was lifting off the estuary like a sheet pulled from a bed, and the sun came up behind the chimney stacks of Gravesend in a band of orange so hot it seemed to hiss.

She got Tobias up the ladder with the mate's help, then climbed to the bridge herself and took the spokes. The wheel was heavier than she expected and pulled left, toward the sandbanks. She set her feet, leaned her weight into it, and called down the speaking tube the one word her father had taught her for moments like this. "Hold." The ship answered, slow and obedient, and kept her course for the river.