Traditional style colour tattoo of a red sailing boat with yellow sails and blue waves, placed on the thigh.

Sailing boat with waves on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A red sailing boat with yellow sails and a pennant at the top sits above blue and white waves. The outlines are bold black, the sails have light hatched shading, and the word MAX is lettered on the red hull. The design is centred on a close crop of skin on the upper leg.

Traditional Thigh Sailboat Boat Sail Sea Wave Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint was still tacky when Dora carried the boat down the steps, and I told her it would ruin the hull, but she said a boat that had never been wet had no business calling itself a boat. So at midnight we stood on the slipway at Gull Steps with the harbour lamps buzzing orange across the water and the tide turning under us like something breathing.

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Max had lettered the name himself with a sable brush the week before he left for Aberdeen, the letters leaning like drunks on a pavement. The sails were cut from one of Dora's old bedsheets, the pennant from the collar of his school shirt. He had wanted it red because red was the colour of the lifeboat, and nothing else he had ever seen floated so bravely. We set it down on the black water and it rode high, hissing a little as the chop slapped its bow.

The ebb caught it before I could kneel. It slid past the bollards and out towards the sluice, its yellow sails catching a stray glow from the crane, and I waded in up to my shins in my good trousers, cursing quietly while Dora laughed behind me. My hand closed on the bowsprit just as the pennant snapped taut. I stood there dripping, holding a boat no bigger than a loaf, and felt the cold come up through my shoes.

I could have kept it. Instead I crouched, set it back on the waves, and gave it one gentle push. Dora read the name aloud as it went, MAX, and then the lamps behind the wall lit the red hull until it looked like a coal drifting out to sea. We watched until we could no longer tell the sails from the spray.