Traditional style tattoo of a sailing ship with XXX beneath it on the back of a hand, with a skull and red flowers continuing up the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship and skull on a hand

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A traditional style sailing ship with black outlines and grey shading sits on the back of a hand, with three small X marks below its hull. A grey skull and red flowers with dark leaves extend up onto the wrist and forearm, and small tattoos appear on the fingers. The ship is shown with blue and green accents on the water and red on the hull, against pale skin and a white background.

Traditional Hand Forearm Ship Sailing ship Skull Flower Rose Finger tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marigold had been three weeks beating round the Horn when the bosun found Tom Keddle asleep in the forepeak with a stolen bottle wedged against his chest like a child. Nobody aboard gave him a chance of seeing Valparaíso. Keddle only tapped the cork with his thumb, grinned through his beard and said the bottle would have to go ashore with him, since it had been promised.

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The carpenter, Mr Ruddock, cut a small X into the hull each time they raised a port that had treated the crew decently, and the sailors took it for superstition rather than bookkeeping. Three marks were already in the planking before the Horn. Keddle asked for a fourth, and Ruddock refused, saying a mark was for a crossing made, not one wished for. Keddle sulked until the lookout called out the Chilean coast.

In Valparaíso the streets climbed the hills by rattling lift and worn stair, and the tattooists worked above a fish market under lanterns strung with red paper. Keddle had a skull inked on the back of his hand there, its empty eyes ringed with the same red flowers an old woman painted on her shutters, because she said the dead liked a bit of colour. He paid her with the bottle, still half full, and she poured what was left into a tin cup for herself.

Ruddock had cut the fourth mark by the time the Marigold sailed for home without him. The crew argued over who had carved it until the bosun produced the bottle from his chest, cork still sealed, and said nobody could tell which of them had kept faith. Keddle's share of the voyage was paid out in Gravesend to a woman with red paper lanterns in her window, and the ship's books listed him as discharged, with a note in Ruddock's neat hand that read simply, Fourth port reached.