Traditional-style colour tattoo covering a man's chest and stomach, with a sailing ship, a skull in a cap, a lighthouse, a parrot and a shark.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship and skull torso piece

Traditional · Chest · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo covers the chest and stomach, showing a sailing ship in dark grey sails amid stormy clouds and lightning. A skull wearing a cap sits on the left, a green and red parrot on the right, and a lighthouse glows above the neck, with a shark in the waves and a banner reading SAILORS GRAVE below. Bold black outlines and flat areas of red, yellow, green and blue ink give the piece a classic bold-line look, with the grey sails providing contrast against the colour.

Traditional Chest Other Sailing ship Skull Lighthouse Shark Wave Lightning Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The schooner went over on the Tarrel Bar with her topsails still set, which old Mab Orrin said afterwards was the only sensible thing anyone aboard did all night. Nobody had thought to reef. The mate went below for his sea-boots and never came back up, and the wind swung round off the Skerries like a fist opening.

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From the gallery of Tarrel light I watched her lamps for an hour, then lost them in the spray. My own lamp was lit, as it always was, its red glass turning above me like a drunk man's eye. Each flash of lightning showed me her hull sinking lower in the swell and her sails gone grey as slate, great black clouds of canvas that would not stop tearing. I counted the sea breaking over her and I kept counting after there was nothing left to count.

At first light the water gave back a sailor's cap, a brass sextant, and a birdcage with a green parrot still clinging to the wire, feathers flat with brine, not making a sound. The fins were already circling the wreck. Hendry from the boathouse wouldn't put a boat out, and I didn't blame him. Something big and grey was working the hull like a dog at a bone.

That spring Hendry painted words on the boathouse board because nobody else would: SAILORS GRAVE, and the date under it in red. The village still goes quiet when it passes the sign. Every evening I climb the iron stairs and light the lamp, and every evening I look for the grey sails on the horizon, though I know the bar has kept what it took.