Two mirrored neo-trad tattoos on the calves showing a white sailing ship on red and grey waves inside a black and grey ornate frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship in an ornate frame on calves

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

Two mirrored tattoos sit on the lower legs, each showing a white silhouetted sailing ship with several sails on dark hatched sea waves. The scene is set against a solid red oval backdrop and enclosed by a detailed black and grey filigree frame with scrolls and leaf-like ornament. Bold outlines and textured shading in the water contrast with the flat red and white areas, and the two copies are laid out symmetrically side by side.

Neo-trad Other Ship Sailing ship Sea Wave Ornate frame Cameo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad left me the frame with the ship still in it, though the glass had cracked across one corner in a line like a shipping lane. He'd hung it in the potting shed for thirty years, a tin oval painted red at the back, the ship on it white as a sheet pegged out in the wind. I meant to take it to the tip. Instead I carried it out to the bed by the wall, propped it against the water butt and sat on an upturned crate to look at it properly.

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The frame was the fussy part. Someone had punched scrolls into the tin and pressed leaves into the curls, and every one had gone black with damp. I was working at the grime with a cocktail stick when Mrs Okonedo leaned on the gate and asked what I was doing with the Armada. I said I was deciding whether the sea needed weeding. She said the sea never needed anything, it only needed a bit of room.

So I pulled the sweet peas from the far bed and put in red dahlias, a whole row, dug in with Dad's trowel. Every evening after tea I sat on the crate while the sun went down behind the leylandii and turned the sky the same red as the painted oval. The ship stayed white against it. For a week nothing happened, except the dahlias came up and the scrolls on the frame came clean.

On the Sunday the wind went round to the south and the gate swung open by itself. The ship was still in its frame, but the water behind it had gone dark and the sails looked full, and something in the garden smelt of salt. I didn't go to the tip after all. I stood the frame on the end of the wall facing the sea and let the ship sail on without me, out past the last of the dahlias.