Traditional flash sheet of ten coloured sailing ships on green waves, with banners reading Hell Bound and Home Ward Bound and a few small stars and a rose.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship flash sheet

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A flash sheet of ten sailing ships with full rigging, drawn with bold black outlines and filled with red, yellow and ochre hulls. Most ships sit on green wave lines, with one on a blue cloud and sun, and a red banner reading Hell Bound and another reading Home Ward Bound. The ships are spaced across a cream background, with a rose and a cluster of red stars as secondary elements.

Traditional Sailing ship Ship Sail Wave Banner Rose Star Sun Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Saturday the Palais on Park Row smelled of Brylcreem and wet wool, and every Saturday I kept one eye on the door for Danny Keogh. He had signed on to the Halcyon Rose in March with a borrowed kitbag and a promise to be back for the summer dances. Mrs Doyle at the cloakroom called the Halcyon a Hell Bound ship before he had even reached the Mersey, because the owners worked their men like mules and the Cape run had already taken two boys from our street.

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The letters came from places I had to find on my father's atlas: Valparaiso, then a port with a name like a sneeze, then nothing for nine weeks. Each one was short and smelled faintly of tar. In the last, he wrote that the men had taken to painting the ship's name on the stern in gold leaf to keep their spirits up, and that the mate had sworn at him for spelling Home Ward as two words. He said he would get it right this time, with a star between them, the way the old clippers did it.

The Halcyon came in on a Tuesday with the tide, and I did not hear until Thursday, when Mrs Doyle came up the stairs with her hat on crooked and a telegram in her fist. The following Saturday he walked into the Palais with his face burnt the colour of ochre and his cap in his hands. He did not speak. He just held out a strip of red ribbon with the words stitched in gold thread.

The band was playing a slow foxtrot. I took the ribbon, tied it round my wrist, and told him the hall had only one rule: nobody leaves until the last waltz. We danced until the caretaker switched off the lights, and the ship on that ribbon looked, for once, like it had finally got where it was going.