Black and grey traditional flash design of a sailing ship on rough sea inside a ship's wheel, with banners reading NEED YOU LIKE WATER IN MY LUNGS.

Sailing ship in a ship's wheel with banner lettering

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white drawing on paper shows a three-masted sailing ship on choppy waves, framed by a circular porthole-style border and a ship's wheel. Two curled banners across the lower and upper design carry the lettering NEED YOU LIKE WATER IN MY LUNGS. The bold outlines, solid black shadowing and dotted detail are typical of traditional nautical flash, and the composition is centred with a plain white background.

Traditional Ship Sailing ship Ship's wheel Wave Sea Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marigold Jane had been three days out of Plymouth when the cook went over the side with a bottle of gin and a hymn book, and nobody on the crew could say which of the two he'd been reading. Bosun Tallow blamed the weather. I blamed the lamp oil. We were both wrong, because the sea that night was flat as a bed sheet, and the only thing moving on it was the ship herself, creeping south with her topsails torn and her wheel lashed hard to starboard.

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I took the wheel at the change of the watch with a splinter in my thumb and a promise to Captain Reyes that I'd hold her steady until the light came up. The brass spokes were cold and wet, and the binnacle lamp threw my shadow across the deck like a black hand trying to pull the ship back to shore. Somewhere below, the water was singing against the hull. I told myself it was the wind in the rigging, but the wind had died hours before.

At dawn I found the cook's hymn book floating in the scuppers, its pages swollen and blue, and tucked inside the cover was a folded note in his crabbed hand. It read only: tell her I was never dry since the day I met her, and I'm finally where I belong. I did not tell anyone what it meant. I took the wheel again, and kept her heading into the grey, and the sea, which had been so patient all night, rolled in under us like it had been waiting for a second visitor.