Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a sailing ship with an anchor and rope waves on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship and anchor on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sailing ship with several billowing sails and dotted decorative lines sits above a coil of rope that forms looping waves. A thin rope hangs down from the hull to a small anchor at the bottom of the design. The linework is bold and black, with stippled dot shading on the sails and hull, set against a plain pale background.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Sailing ship Ship Sail Rope Wave Anchor

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marigold Rose had been twelve days at anchor off Scarrow Point, and Tomas Lenz had counted every one of them from the rail of the chandlery pier. Nobody in the harbour would sell him paint for the hull, so he sold his father's pocket watch instead and bought a pot of black, a brush with three bristles, and a sheet of oilcloth to wrap the sails in. The sails were the trouble. Every morning they came back grey and sagging from the fog, and every morning Mrs Ibbotson at the gate said the same thing, that a ship with no crew and no money was only a very large bath.

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He was not a fool about it. He knew the mainsail needed mending and that the rope for the stern had rotted through at the splice. But he had also seen the old chart in the back room of the Anchor, with its tangled line of coast drawn in and a little hook marking the place where the water went deep and quiet. That was where he meant to go. He kept his tools in a tin on the bow and worked the dots into the planking one at a time, because his grandmother had told him that stippled wood never rots.

On the thirteenth morning the fog lifted and the wind came round from the west, and the sails filled before he had even hauled the anchor. He did not wait for the harbour bell. He let the chain run out to its last link, cut it with his knife, and watched the iron fall through the green water until it found the bottom and held there like a dropped coin. Behind him Scarrow Point went small and grey. Ahead, the sea opened out, blue as ink from the tin.