Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a sailing ship on rolling waves with a dotted anchor hanging below, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship and anchor on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship with furled and full sails sits on stylised waves, with a fine dotted line descending to a small anchor. The ship and waves are built from fine linework and stippled dots, with shading that gives the sails and hull some depth. The tattoo is in black ink only and is centred on the inner forearm against a plain, light background.

Dotwork Fine line Forearm Sailing ship Ship Wave Sea Anchor Sail

Find an artist for this

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

Maren had counted the sails three times from the broken wall of Kilcairn, and each time the ship was still there, holding its place above the swell as if someone had pinned it to the water. Three masts, the fore and main full of wind that never reached the shore. The tide was pushing grey over the flats below the castle, and the weed on the stairs was already slick enough to make her grip the iron rail.

Keep reading

Her grandfather had told her the ship was the Margery Doane, a collier out of Wick that went down in a February squall with her anchor still hung over the bow. Nobody had ever found that anchor on the seabed. Folk said it was the thing that kept her, a fine line of dots running down from the hull, waiting for someone to haul it up. Maren had never believed a word of it until the morning her brother Tam went out to the skerries after lobster pots and the fog came in so thick she could not see the boathouse from the gate.

She climbed down to the mooring ring in the castle wall, rusted to the colour of old brick, and tied the boathouse rope to it with a knot her grandfather had taught her. The rope would not reach the ship. She tied it anyway, and called out across the water the way he had always called to boats coming home in fog, her voice thin against the gulls.

The fog lifted on the turn of the tide. The ship was gone, the sea flat and bright, and the rope lay slack over the rock with a small black anchor hanging from its end, though she had not tied one on. Tam came up the cliff path an hour later, soaked and cross, a pot of crabs in each hand. He looked at the anchor and then at her. "Where'd that come from?" he asked, and she told him the truth, which was that she did not know, but that the Margery Doane had finally come about.