Traditional tattoo of a sailing ship among clouds, with red roses and a banner reading The Atlantic Was Born Today, on the thigh.

Sailing ship and roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A sailing ship with grey, billowing sails sits among clouds, yellow flowers and dark leaves. Two red roses and a ribbon banner reading The Atlantic was born today fill the lower half of the design. Bold black outlines with solid red, yellow, green and grey shading give it a classic flash-sheet look.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The midwife had already sent for the carpenter when the sea began to labour. Down in the low kingdom of Carrowmere the water had lain flat as a pewter plate for nine days, and the fishwives said it was only holding its breath. On the tenth morning it rolled over, groaned under the cliffs at Saint Tessa's, and salt came up through the cobbles of the harbour like a fever.

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Queen Orla sent her three sons to the shore with rope and lamps. Only the youngest, Benedek, had the sense to bring a loaf and a flask of mead, and he sat on the wet stones while his brothers shouted at the tide. The sea did not look at them. It looked at the ship being built in the dry dock, a great three-masted thing with sails the colour of storm cloud, and it began to rise towards her hull the way a mother rises towards a cradle.

On the eleventh night the ship went down the slipway without anyone touching it. Benedek watched it pass the lighthouse with a red rose painted on its bow and the words the carpenter had lettered there that morning: THE ATLANTIC, and beneath them, because the carpenter insisted on a joke, WAS BORN TODAY. Then the lamps along the coast went out one by one, not from wind, but as if the kingdom had decided to sleep.

Benedek kept the loaf. Every spring the tide comes in with a little more salt than it needs, and the fishwives of Carrowmere say it is the sea remembering its first morning. They also say the boy who sat still on the stones was the only one who was ever given a ship for his trouble, though nobody has ever seen him sail it.

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