Black dotwork and linework tattoo of a sailing ship on waves inside a circle with clouds and birds, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship in a dotwork circle

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship with full sails and a pennant sits within a circular frame, with waves in the foreground and clouds and two birds in the sky. The ship and waves are drawn with fine outlines, while the clouds, sails and sea are built up with stippled dots and short hatching. The tattoo is entirely black ink on pale skin, and the circular composition is centred on the upper arm.

Dotwork Traditional Upper arm Ship Sailing ship Wave Cloud Bird Sea Sail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your stools nearer, the lot of you, the fire's only warm at the front. Now, you won't believe me, but the ship in the scriptorium was drawn by a boy who had never seen the sea. Cuthbert was his name, a thin lad from the salt flats with ink under his nails and no Latin worth the name. The abbot set him to copying psalters, and he copied them well, but in the margins he kept drawing the same thing over and over: a three-masted ship, sails full as lungs, riding a sea he made by pricking the vellum with a stylus until it looked like rain.

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Brother Anselm found one of these pages and held it up to the window. "You've wasted a good calf-skin," he said, but he didn't tear it. He looked a long while at the little gulls, three strokes each, then asked, "Where's the wind coming from?" Cuthbert pointed at the pennant. Anselm grunted and went off to ring for Vespers, and the page stayed on the desk, and the boy drew a ring of clouds around it so it would be a window and not a page.

That winter the fleet out of Scarrow went down in a black blow, six hulls and nine men from our own parish. Cuthbert sat up with his drawing every night, pressing the dots deeper, until the sea on the page had holes worn through it. On the third night the bell in the ruined tower rang on its own, which Osric swears is true.

Come spring, a single ship limped into the cove with a torn pennant, and a survivor walked up the hill carrying a folded scrap of vellum sewn inside his coat. It was Cuthbert's ship, three masts and all. He said the wind had come from the direction the boy had pointed. Cuthbert, I'm told, sat down on the steps of the scriptorium and wept, though he'd only ever drawn what he'd never seen.