Black and grey tattoo of a sailing ship with a flock of birds flying from its sails, waves beneath and the words SAIL ON on the forearm.

Sailing ship and birds on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a three-masted sailing ship sits on the inner forearm, with its sails shaded in soft grey tones and rigging drawn in fine black lines. A flock of birds streams away from the ship across the skin, and the lettering SAIL ON sits in a block typeface to the left. Wave lines at the base of the hull anchor the composition, set against a softly blurred background.

Traditional Forearm Ship Sailing ship Bird Wave Sail Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the bench, it's older than your granddad and twice as honest. Right, where was I. The Marigold, three masts, and a fortnight of nothing. The wind had lain down like a dog in the sun and wouldn't be coaxed up for love or biscuit. The water was so flat you could read the cook's handwriting in it.

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Captain Ezra Pell kept a crate of linnets in the lee of the galley, and the men called them his conscience because they sang when he was wrong. On the fourteenth morning the water barrels were down to a finger's depth, and Tobias Quill, the mate, came aft with his cap in both hands and said the men wanted the boats lowered and the ship turned for home. Pell didn't argue. He carried the crate to the rail himself.

He took the lid off and held it up to the sky, and nothing happened for a long while. Then the birds went up all at once, a grey cloud of them, and they didn't circle the ship like birds that know their business. They streamed west in a line as straight as a rule, thinning and gathering and thinning again. Ned, the cook's boy, swore he saw a seam of cloud far off where the line pointed. Pell chalked two words on the transom board, SAIL ON, and told the helmsman to follow the birds.

The wind came up that evening, a cold breath off the bow, and the sails filled with a sound like a crowd drawing breath. We made landfall four days later, and the birds were long gone by then. Pell never said whether he'd known the way all along. Pass me that jug, would you, my throat's gone dry.