Traditional-style tattoo of a sailing ship over mountains and a coloured mandala flower on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship and mandala on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship with billowing black and grey sails sits above stylised mountains and a red and teal sky inside a bold outline. Below, a large mandala-style flower in pink, orange and turquoise fills the lower forearm, framed by solid black shapes. Bold black outlines and saturated colour fills give the piece a classic flash look, photographed indoors against a plain background.

Traditional Forearm Ship Sailing ship Mountain Mandala Flower Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My uncle Emrys came up from the Rhondda shift every Friday with coal in the creases of his neck, and every Friday my nan pretended not to look at the ink on his arm. He'd had it done in Cardiff the year before he went down the pit, back when he still talked about the Cape Horn run he'd never made. The ship was three-masted, every sail swollen like someone had breathed into it, and above the hull the mountains went teal where the sky went red.

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Nobody in our row believed in ships. We had the winding wheel at the colliery, a great iron thing that lowered the cages, and Emrys liked to say it was the only steering wheel a man needed. On the morning the roof came in at number four, he was on the far side of the seam with three others. They dug for six hours. My nan sat on the step with a flask she kept refilling and never opened.

When they brought him out he was grey to the elbows and furious at the fuss. The first thing he asked for was his forearm, where the pink and orange mandala had been put over an old burn from a different job. 'Still pointing north,' he said, tapping it with a black finger. I laughed, and he laughed harder than the joke deserved, and that was when I understood he had carried the sea down the mine with him all along.

On Sunday we walked up to the tip where the valley runs out toward the water. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at the grey line of the Channel for a long time, then said the wheel could turn without him for once.