Small fine line tattoo of a sailboat above a wavy sea line, placed on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailboat on the upper chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A small single-needle style outline of a sailboat with two sails and a pennant, sitting on a wavy line of water. The linework is thin and even, in dark ink, with no shading or fill. The tattoo is centred in a close crop of bare upper chest and shoulder, with a hand partly visible at the left edge.

Fine line Chest Sailboat Boat Sail Sea Wave Water

Find an artist for this

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

Dunrath Castle had been roofless since before anyone's grandmother was born, but the harbour office still sent its messages up the cliff path, and that was how Rowan came to be sitting on the broken curtain wall with a fine-nibbed pen and a sheet of cartridge paper on his knee. His grandfather had given him the job of drawing the boats for the insurers, so they could tell one hull from another in a bad fog. Shading was for people who did not trust their outlines, the old man said, so Rowan drew everything in single unbroken strokes and never once lifted the nib until the boat was finished.

Keep reading

Every morning he drew the cutter Ellen May: two sails, a pennant streaming off the masthead, and three wavy lines underneath for the sea. Then he pinned the sheet to the chapel arch, where the wind coming off the bay would have to get past it before it reached the village. The drawings piled up in a tin box under a loose stone, forty or fifty of them, all the Ellen May as she looked when she was leaving the harbour wall with the tide behind her.

On the Thursday she did not come in, the harbourmaster asked him for a drawing for the search party, and Rowan realised he had only ever drawn her going out. So he drew her coming home instead: sails furled, pennant hanging limp, the water flat as slate. He worked slowly, lifting the nib only twice. When he carried the sheet down the path at dusk, the lamps were already lit along the quay, and a figure was waving a lantern from the end of the slip.

He did not tell her afterwards that he had drawn her homecoming first. He simply handed her the damp sheet, and she laughed and said he had got the waves wrong, they were never that polite.