Black and grey tattoo of a sailing ship with birds flying off its sails, waves below and the words SAIL ON beside them, on the forearm.

Sailing ship and birds on an arm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large sailing ship with full sails sits at the right of the design, with birds lifting away from its rigging towards the left. Shaded sails and hull contrast with bold outlines and solid dark wave lines along the bottom. The words SAIL ON in a plain serif capital lettering sit on the left, and the whole design is in black ink and grey shading.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The doves went up at first light, the way they always did when Ada wanted the harbour to see us leaving. Eleven birds, grey as slate, climbed off the rail of the wagon we had hauled onto the quay at Grimsby. Behind them the old banner hung limp on its pole: a three-master painted in 1962 with every sail belled out, and beneath it the words SAIL ON, because Mr Lusk believed a circus was only a ship that had forgotten the sea.

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Nobody had been paid since August. The lions went to a zoo near Lincoln and the ponies to a farm outside Louth, and the rest of us sat on upturned crates eating tinned peaches with our fingers. Mr Lusk sold the big top to a man who buys canvas by the yard, and I was the one sent to fold it. Along one seam I found a square of spare sailcloth sewn in red thread, a little ship sketched on it in chalk, and a line in Ada's round hand: for whoever sails next.

I did not go with the others to the bus station. I walked out along the mole where the coblesmen tie up, and the doves came back, circling once before settling on a crab pot. I knotted the scrap of canvas to the forestay of a boat nobody had claimed, and when the wind came off the North Sea it filled the cloth, and for a moment the little ship strained at its rope as if it remembered the water.

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