Sailing ship above a profile woman on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A woman's head in profile wears a tall black updo strung with a dotted line of pearls, and a sailing ship with pink sails and a red and yellow hull sits on top of the hair. Bold black outlines and shaded hair contrast with flat colour on the face, ship and small blue marks near the neck. The design runs vertically along the side of the torso, with the ship at the top and the neck and blue details at the bottom.

Traditional Ribs Woman Profile Sailing ship Pearl Updo Starfish Bubble

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lodgers at Gull Rock House never agreed about the weather, but they agreed that Mrs Pardoe's hair was the tallest thing on the Cornish coast. Each morning she piled it three storeys high with whalebone combs and strung it with seed pearls, and on top of it all sat the little ship with its pink sails furled. Nobody asked where it came from. When the wind came in off the bay, the rigging sang against her scalp, and the lodgers said that was how you knew it was a good day for fish.

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It was Ansel Crake, the chart-maker from Bristol, who asked to sail on it. He had paid for three weeks in advance and wanted to draw the coast from the water, so one evening he climbed up into the hair while she dozed sitting up. She woke with the hull lurching beneath her and the pearls rattling like dice. She did not scold him. She took him down through the bubbles to where the starfish kept their tables, and showed him that a man who counts the stars at sea will never once be lost.

Crake did not come back up. The landlady's lamp burned in the upstairs window every night for a year, and each morning the pearls had slipped a little further down the black coil toward her neck, where the blue marks were spreading like tide-wash on wet sand.

Ask anyone in Gull Rock and they will tell you the ship is still sailing, and that the pearls are falling back to the sea one at a time. The starfish on the shingle each morning are always counted, and there is always one more than the night before.