Black and grey tattoo of a three-masted sailing ship inside a bottle with a rope stopper, on the inner forearm.

Sailing ship in a bottle on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship with billowing sails sits inside a glass bottle topped with a rope-wrapped stopper, with clouds drifting above the masts. The ship is drawn in clean black outlines with hatched shading on the sails and hull, while the sea and the base of the bottle use stippled and wavy lines. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a pale forearm, filling most of the frame against a dark background.

Traditional Forearm Ship Sailing ship Bottle Rope Wave Sea Cloud Sail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas Pryce went down the Ffynnon pit at six every morning for thirty-one years, and every evening he came up grey to the elbows. His daughter Nell asked him once what the sea looked like. He said he had never seen it, and that a sea was only a great deal of water with nowhere to stand. She did not believe him. So one winter he took a squat green bottle from the chapel jumble and set about getting a ship inside it.

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The men at the club said ships did not go into bottles, and Tomas agreed with them. He cut the hull from a scrap of ash no longer than his thumb, rigged it with thread from his wife's sewing box, and folded the sails from the thinnest paper the Co-op sold. Each night he fed the mast through the neck with tweezers from the surgery, and each morning the sails had collapsed, so he flattened them on the kitchen table with the heel of his hand.

By March the ship was whole, three masts and all. Nell stood at his elbow while he wound the stopper with the last of the twine and sealed it with pitch. She asked where the sea would go. He looked at the bottle a long while, then tipped in a spoonful of wet sand from the cockle beds at Pembrey and laid the clouds over the masts with a stroke of chalk. Nell held it to the window. The light came through the green glass and the ship seemed to lean, though it stayed exactly where it was.

The pit closed the following year and the family moved north to Crewe, where the railway sheds were hiring. Nell kept the bottle on the sill of every rented room she lived in. When people asked about the ship, she said her father had sailed it there and back, which was nearer the truth than they knew. She never once pulled the cork. On quiet nights she held the bottle to the lamp and watched the little ship ride out over its sand, still under sail, still a long way from any shore he had ever seen.