Traditional style tattoo of a sailing ship against a red sunset inside a rope border, with a flower below, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship and flower on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship with white sails and red rigging sits against a red and orange sunset, framed by a dark rope border. Bold black outlines and solid fills define the hull, sails and waves, with green hills or waves at the base. A white and blue flower with red petals sits at the bottom centre of the composition.

Traditional Forearm Sailing ship Ship Sunset Rope Wave Flower Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ship came round the Scarrow shoal on the last of the light, three masts standing black against a sky the colour of a boiled sweet. I had let the lamp go dim that evening, since the paraffin was low and the Board had not sent a boat in five weeks, so I was up on the gallery with a rag and the lens when I saw her heel toward the rocks. Her sails were still white, though the red rigging caught the sunset and made them look painted onto the dark.

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I ran down the iron stairs two at a time, struck the flint, and by the time the wick caught she had cleared the teeth of the reef by the width of a dinghy. Her captain, a broad woman called Ada Pell, rowed ashore at dawn to thank me. She did not thank me. She stood on the landing with her hat in her hands and asked why a light had been out on a clear night, and I told her the truth, which was that I had been counting tins and feeling sorry for myself.

She laughed, a short bark, then bent and picked a flower from a crack in the rock, pale blue at the heart with red-edged petals, the sort of thing that grows nowhere but here. "For the logbook," she said. "Put down that you were awake."

I pressed it between the pages that night, under the entry for the hour the light went out, and wrote beside it: lit at 19:40, vessel passed, all well. Ada's ship was a speck by noon. The flower is still there, brown now as a biscuit, and the page curls toward the spine whenever the wind comes in off the water.