Black and grey realism tattoo of a sailing ship in a stormy sea covering a person's back, with the ship's rigging and sails rendered in fine detail.

Sailing ship in a storm across a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows a three-masted sailing ship with full sails heeling through rough water beneath a heavy, billowing sky. Rigging, ropes and rolling waves fill the lower half, with a dark wave and what looks like a ship's figurehead or hull detail at the bottom. The work uses soft grey shading and fine hatching for the sails and clouds, with strong dark contrast on the hull and rigging.

Realism Back Ship Sailing ship Storm Sea Wave Cloud Rigging Sail Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp had burned in the keep at Carrow every night since the roof fell in, and nobody in the village could say who lit it. Ana Sorel said it was her. She climbed the broken stair with a tin lantern and a sack of tallow, past the place where the wall had split like a loaf, and hung the light in the empty window that faced the sea.

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The autumn the three-master came in, the wind had blown for four days. The sky was the colour of old slate and the waves stood higher than the walls. Ana saw the ship first as a pale shape, its sails bellied out with far too much canvas for such weather, and then she heard the crew shouting over the surf. The captain was Veitch, who had sold the village's grain to the king's men and sworn he would never come back. He saw her light and steered for it, because a light meant a harbour, and a harbour meant someone was alive to hear him.

The rocks lay under the water on either side of the beam. Ana knew the channel because her mother had walked it at low tide with a pole, and she knew the lamp had to sit exactly over it. She didn't move. She swung the lantern slowly along the sill, left and then right, the way her mother had taught her, and the ship came round in the gap between the reef and the headland with its mainsail tearing like paper. Veitch never thanked her. He never came back either.

In the spring a figurehead came up on the shingle below the keep, a carved woman with weed in her hair and one arm broken off at the elbow. Ana hauled it up the stair alone and set it in the window beside the lamp, where it could watch the sea until the last of the roof came down.