Fine line black sailboat tattoo on the inner wrist of a fist raised against a dark wooden surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailboat outline on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small sailboat with two sails and a hull is drawn in a single thin black outline on the underside of the wrist. The linework is even and unshaded, with a simple waterline beneath the hull. The ink is the only colour, set against pale skin and a dark wooden background.

Fine line Forearm Sailboat Boat Sail Outline

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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

Pull your chair nearer, because the fire's sulking and I'm not raising my voice over this kettle. Old Ned Pascoe never raised his voice in his life, and he still had the whole of the Bell Inn hushed when he spoke.

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Ned was a net-mender with clumsy hands, but he could draw a boat. He sketched one on the back of a chandler's bill while his tea went cold: a single line for the hull, a single line of water beneath it, and two sails leaning away from a wind nobody else could see. He pinned it above the bunk in the Margery Ann, the little sloop he'd built with his brother, and told the crew it was the only chart they'd need.

The Margery Ann went out on a Thursday in March with the glass falling and a grin on her skipper's face. She did not come back. The sea kept the hull, the sails and the brother, and gave back nothing but a sodden scrap of pinned paper that washed onto the slipway three tides later, the ink still clear enough to make out the sails.

Ned never framed it. He nailed it to the door of the boathouse where the wind off the bay could reach it, and every morning it lifted and settled as if somebody out past the breakwater was still trying to tack home. Mind the stair on your way up. And mind the tide, my love. It comes in quicker than it goes out, and it never once asks permission.