Traditional style colour tattoo on a person's side above the hip, showing a red open mouth with teeth beside a sailing ship on blue waves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship and waves with open mouth

Traditional · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A sailing ship with three masts and furled sails sits on a stylised sea of blue and teal waves, with two small birds in the sky above. To the left, a large red open mouth with white teeth and a dark interior is outlined in bold black lines. The tattoo has solid colour fills and heavy outlines, and it is framed by a mustard jumper above and black lace underwear below.

Traditional Ribs Ship Sailing ship Wave Sea Mouth Teeth Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Forty days out from Valparaíso and the sea had stopped being water and started being a debt. You counted the wave the moment it lifted off the larboard bow, a grey hill that split along its crest into a red mouth wider than the foremast, with teeth like a row of spilled tallow candles. Mr Pryce, the bosun, swore it was only the swell catching the light. You knew better. You had watched the thing follow the Marigold for three weeks, breathing salt.

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The captain ordered every sail reefed and the watch doubled, and nobody slept. Old Tobias Quill, who had rounded the Horn twice and lost a thumb to a halyard both times, sat on the hatch with a tin cup of rum and told you that the sea takes one name for every ship it lets pass. So you wrote your name on a scrap of canvas, stitched it inside your collar, and climbed to the crosstrees, where the wind moaned through the rigging like a choir that had forgotten the words.

At the turn of the middle watch the birds came. Two terns, thin as pencil strokes, settled on the topgallant yard and would not be shooed. Quill laughed until he coughed. Birds, he said, do not perch on a ship that is about to be eaten. They perch on ships that are going home.

The mouth sank behind the stern at first light, and the water lay flat and blue as a healing bruise. You kept the canvas collar and never learned whose name had gone down that night. The Marigold raised the Eddystone on the fortieth day with every sail drawing. Only later did you notice you had been standing at the rail, looking south, saying your own name to the water like a man checking his pockets.