Traditional style colour tattoo on a thigh showing a sailing ship inside a ship's wheel, with an anchor, a rose and a small cross.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship and anchor in a ship's wheel on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A sailing ship with cream sails sits inside a brown ship's wheel with rope detailing, set against teal and blue waves. An anchor hangs at the lower left, and a red and pink rose with green leaves sits at the top right, with a small black cross near the right edge. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills give the piece a classic traditional look, and the design is centred on the outer thigh with a blue garment visible above it.

Traditional Thigh Sailing ship Ship's wheel Anchor Rose Wave Cross Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, boy, and mind the tar on that step. The wind off the Aegean has teeth this month, and my knees have already told me so. You want the tale of the Syros grain ship, do you? Then hush, and let me tell it the way my father told it to me, with the sea doing all the shouting.

Keep reading

Callistrate was a grain master who owned one ship, the Hesperis, with sails the colour of old bone. Every autumn he steered her out past the breakwater with a wheel of oak bound in rope, and every autumn the sea tried to take that wheel from him. He kept a rule that no sailor on his deck could break. The wheel never leaves your hands to look at the water. Look at the stars, look at the anchor stone lashed under the bench, but never at the foam.

One dusk the sea turned from teal to blue-black, and a squall came down off the headland with no warning at all. The crew begged him to drop anchor in the lee of the rocks. Callistrate refused, because his wife Myrta was standing on the quay with a red cloth tied to a pole, and he had promised her a rose from the Cretan gardens before the frost. He hauled the wheel through three black waves, and the anchor went down only when the stars came back. It caught on the reef and held.

When they came ashore, Myrta had planted the cutting in a cracked amphora by the water, and it had already opened, pink as a lamp. Callistrate pressed one petal into his palm and said nothing. If you go down to the harbour wall in Syros today, you will still find an iron anchor rusting there, and beside it a little cross scratched into the stone by a sailor who thought a saint had saved him. It was a woman's red cloth that did it, boy, and I will not hear otherwise.