Black and grey fine line tattoo of a sailboat on rippling sea inside a circle of sunburst rays, on the upper back.

Sailboat at sea in a circle on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A sailboat with a single bird in the sky sits on a horizon line above layered waves, all enclosed in a circular frame. The sunburst rays radiating behind the boat are drawn in fine parallel strokes, while the waves use contour lines and hatching. The design is rendered only in black ink and grey tones, centred on the upper back below a dark hairline.

Fine line Back Sailboat Sea Wave Sun Sunburst Bird Horizon Circle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, you're letting the cold in. Leave the door, it's the lift that's broken, not the wind. Where was I? Ah, yes, the boat.

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Hettie Marsh lived on the eleventh floor of Bellmouth House, the tower above the harbour in Saltcombe, and from up there you could see the whole mouth of the bay and nothing of the town. Every morning she stood at the kitchen window with her tea and counted the boats coming in. Forty-one, once, on a good May. She owned no boat. She owned a biscuit tin full of old Ordnance Survey maps and a flat that smelled of Brasso, and she had never once been further out than the breakwater.

Then the Penhallow twins, who fished off the pier, dragged a sailing cutter out of a shed fire, half-burnt and stinking of creosote, and asked her what she'd give them for it. She gave them a fiver and a pot of their mother's jam. The boat sat in the car park all winter while Hettie sat in it with a torch, reading the charts by the hour, learning the names of the winds like a catechism. When the spring came she took it out alone, past the breakwater, on a westerly nobody else thought was worth the bother.

She came back at dusk with the sun behind her and a single gull riding the stern, as if it had signed on as crew. Ever after, the people in the flats below swore they could see her little sail go out to the edge of the light each morning. And if you stand where she stood, at the kitchen window, and watch the sun come up over the bay, you'll see the rays fan out just so. Hettie always said there were exactly as many as the boats still out.