Colour tattoo of a sailing ship on rough blue waves beneath a full moon and purple clouds, with script lettering above, on the outer thigh.

Sailing ship and full moon on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship with white and teal sails sits on stylised blue and white waves, with a large full moon and purple-grey clouds behind it. Script lettering arcs across the top of the moon. Shading is soft on the moon and clouds, with bold outlines on the ship and waves, and the palette is mostly blues, purples and greys with touches of gold on the hull.

Traditional Thigh Sailing ship Ship Moon Wave Sea Cloud Script Lettering Quote

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

Mairi Gow counted the boats in before the moon cleared the headland, and she counted them twice. Eleven hulls rode the harbour swell where there should have been twelve. The Morag Rose was the one missing, and her skipper had promised his wife a sack of ling for the church bazaar before the week was out. Nobody on the quay said much. They kept coiling rope and looking at the sea.

Keep reading

The glass had dropped like a stone since noon, and by ten the swell came in grey and heavy beneath a moon so full and white it turned the spray to salt. Mairi stood at the end of the pier with her shawl pulled tight. Her brother Davie had signed on as deckhand that spring, and she had not forgiven him for the money he owed Hector at the net loft, nor for the way he laughed when she asked him to stay home and pay it off.

Near one o'clock, when the crowd had thinned to old men and dogs, a sail lifted out of the mist beyond the breakwater. It was not the Rose. It was a tall three-master with canvas pale as bone, the kind nobody had rigged along this coast since her great-grandfather's day, and it came on without a sound against the wind. Its hull was the colour of old brass where the moonlight caught it. No lamp showed at the bow, and no one stood at the wheel that Mairi could see.

She did not run. She waited until the ship slid past the pier close enough to read the name on its stern: Morag Rose, in faded letters, and beneath it, scratched into the timber by an unsteady hand, one line. One more day. At dawn the real Rose came limping in on the tide with a torn foresail and her crew asleep on deck. Davie was first up the ladder. He took one look at his sister's face, walked straight to the net loft, and paid Hector every penny.