Black and grey sailing ship tattoo with a rose and scrollwork running down the ribs and onto the hip in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship and rose down the side and hip

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large sailing ship with full rigging runs vertically along the side of the torso and over the ribs, with a rose and ornate scrollwork at the hip. The linework is bold and outlined, with grey shading in the sails and hull. The tattoo is shown in a mirror selfie against a bright bedroom, with the subject's face out of frame.

Traditional Ribs Thigh Sailing ship Ship Rose Scrollwork Flourish Rigging Sail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Thessaly Rose had been in dry dock at Coldharbour Quay since Lent, and by the third week of May I knew every rope of her rigging better than I knew my own wife's handwriting. Mr Pardoe, the owner, wanted her full-rigged again for the Baltic run, topsails and all, and he wanted it done before the regatta. I told him a ship is not finished until the last rope has been counted twice.

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My apprentice, Tobias Wren, could tie a bowline blindfold but had no patience for the scrollwork. Every evening I sent him home and sat alone with the lamp, carving the rose that sat under the stern windows. Old Mrs Pardoe had asked for it, the same bloom her husband had painted on the first Rose forty years back, and she would not hear of a modern pattern. Petals first, then the leaves curled out like a fiddlehead, then the flourish that ran round the hull like a wave that had decided to stay.

On the last night the tide came in higher than the harbour master had promised, and the dock gate groaned. I found Tobias on the staging with a bucket of tar, shaking. He had counted the mainsail's reef points wrong, he said, and the sail would have split on the first squall. I climbed up beside him and we counted them together, forty-two each, and they came out true. He laughed, and I told him that is the whole trade, counting twice and trusting the second count.

When the Rose went out on the morning ebb, Mrs Pardoe stood on the quay with her hand flat over her heart. I did not watch the sails. I watched the rose on her stern, pale in the early light, and thought that some things are only worth making if somebody else will sail them away.