Traditional style tattoo on a calf of a sailing ship in a storm above waves, with a compass rose and anchor chains below, in red, orange, yellow and grey.

Sailing ship and compass on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship with billowing dark sails and a red and orange hull rides over grey and white waves, with storm clouds behind it. Below the waves, a compass rose with a golden globe at its centre is framed by anchor chains. Bold black outlines, solid colour fills and grey shading give the design a classic traditional look, with red, orange and yellow used throughout.

Traditional Calf Ship Sailing ship Wave Storm Cloud Compass Globe Anchor Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marigold was four days out from Falmouth when the glass began to fall, and Ned Pargeter stood at the binnacle with his hand flat on the brass housing, waiting for the needle to settle. It would not. The card swung east, then west, then sulked somewhere south of nothing, and below him the men had stopped their singing.

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The captain came up with his coat unbuttoned and a face like wet paper. "Your compass is lying to you, boy," he said, though he did not sound sure. Ned had sailed under him for six years and had never once heard him admit a fault in anything. Behind them the clouds stacked up black over the stern, orange where the last light caught their edges, and the first wave came over the rail hard enough to take the cook's bucket clean away.

Ned did the only thing his father had taught him at the cooperage in Penryn. He stopped looking at the card and watched the sea itself, the long grey ridges marching in from the west, and he steered for the gaps between them. Forty minutes later the wind dropped as suddenly as it had come, and the card, which had been wandering, swung round and held steady on north.

At first light the Marigold lay quiet on a flat sea with her topsails torn and her hull streaked with salt. Ned wrote in the log that the wind had backed and the compass was true, then crossed out "true" and wrote "mostly". The captain read it over his shoulder, laughed, and let it stand.