Black and grey dotwork sailboat tattoo with an anchor on the sail, a small red heart, and stippled waves, sitting on the side of the torso above jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailboat and waves on the side of the torso

Dotwork · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A small sailboat with a pennant, an anchor and a red heart on the sail sits above a scalloped hull and stippled waves. The sailboat is drawn in clean black outlines with the hull and waves shaded in dots and fine lines. Only the heart is coloured red, and the photograph is black and white with soft, even lighting.

Dotwork Ribs Sailboat Anchor Heart Wave Sail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pennant was already torn when Nell Harrow hauled the Marigold off the slip, and her father swore it had been whole the night before. He was wrong about most things by then, but the tear was real enough, a ragged tongue of blue cloth snapping above the mast as if it wanted to be somewhere else.

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They took her out on the ebb with the wind backing north-west, the way it always did before a blow. Nell had the tiller and her father had the sheet, and neither of them spoke about the anchor locker, which had been empty since March, when the chain went over the side with her brother still tangled in it. The waves came up under the scalloped hull in long grey curls, dotted white where the spray caught them, and every one seemed to be reaching for the bow.

Off the Ness they found the buoy she had been looking for, bobbing in its own small storm of gulls. Someone had knotted a scrap of red wool around it. Her father leaned over the rail to read the name stencilled on the side and said nothing for a long time. Then he reached into his coat, took out the little brass anchor he had carried since the war, and tossed it onto the deck between them.

Nell picked it up and turned it over. Scratched into the shank were two initials and a small heart, its curve filled in with the red thread her mother used to mend sails. She lashed the anchor to the tiller and let the boat come about, slow and deliberate, back toward the harbour lights. It was the first time the Marigold had ever come home with nothing left on the bottom.