Traditional-style flash design on paper showing a sailing ship on rough seas and a black and grey rose in a bold black oval frame, with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship and rose flash in oval frame

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design on paper showing a three-masted sailing ship in heavy swell beside a large rose with leaves, enclosed in a thick black oval outline. The ship and rose are shaded in greys with bold black outlines, and yellow highlights appear on the clouds and a streak of lightning. The composition places the rose in the lower left and the ship in the upper right, with a crescent moon, birds and cumulus clouds filling the sky.

Traditional Ship Sailing ship Rose Wave Cloud Crescent moon Bird Lightning Oval frame Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide made the border every night, and each morning the wardens walked out along the sea wall to see how far it had pulled the line. Maud Eskdale kept the stakes and the ledger, and she kept the toll, which was one rose for every sail that wished to cross. The roses came from the walled garden on the headland, and nobody on the mainland side had ever been known to bring one.

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The ship came in out of the west on a swell so heavy the wall shook. Three masts, sails grey as slate, and a light in her rigging that wasn't lantern light. Her captain stood at the rail with his hat in his hand and said he had come to cross, and Maud told him the price. He laughed, not unkindly, and said he had no roses, only a dead one folded in his coat from a girl who had sent him off with it years back.

Maud took the rose and turned it over in the grey light. It had been cut from her own bush, the one by the gate, and she knew the pale spot on the third petal where she had pinched it. She had not expected it to come back to her. The lightning in the west was yellow along the cloud edge, and the crescent moon hung over the masts like a hook. She opened the ledger and wrote the ship's name, then stopped and wrote her own beside it, which was not the rule.

At dawn the stake on the sea wall had moved a full yard seaward. The ship was gone, and where she had been there was nothing on the water but a long white line running back toward the west, and a single rose lying on the stones at Maud's feet, its petals still wet.