Black linework tattoo of a sailing ship tossed by waves beneath a rain cloud, in a blackwork style, on the upper arm.

Sailing ship in a storm on the upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship rides rough, curling waves beneath a stacked storm cloud that releases diagonal rain lines. The linework is bold black outline with fine hatching in the clouds and rain, and the waves are drawn as flowing parallel lines. The design is entirely black and grey and wraps around the upper arm, with the cloud at the top near the shoulder.

Blackwork Upper arm Ship Sailing ship Storm Cloud Rain Wave Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cake knife was still in its box when the rain came, which Aunt Maud said was a bad omen and Dougie's new wife said was just Whitby. Nell stood in the doorway of the Sea Scouts hall with a tea towel over her shoulder and watched the cloud come in off the harbour, stacked and grey as wet slate, the rain falling in long straight lines across the car park.

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Her grandad Walt had kept a folded paper in his breast pocket for fifty years, soft as cloth at the creases. It was the crew list of the Margaret Ellery, a three-masted barque that went down in a February gale off the Dogger Bank in 1958. Walt had been twenty and had got off at Lerwick with a fever that saved his life. He used to say the sea did not drown men so much as lose interest in them, and that you had to keep turning up to be looked at.

Dougie wanted Walt's name read out during the speeches, so Nell ran through the drizzle to the car for the paper. The windscreen blurred and she sat with the wipers off, unfolding it on the wheel. Under the crew names someone had pencilled a line in Walt's wobbling capitals: SHE'S STILL OUT THERE KEEPING HER HEAD UP. She read it twice, then looked up at the hall, where the lights were on and the rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started.

She folded the paper back along its soft creases and went in, dripping on the parquet. When Dougie asked if she had it, she said yes and that it was a better speech than he would have written. Out past the harbour wall a boat was coming in under a sky going pale at the edges, and Nell noticed it had every sail set.