Black and grey traditional tattoo of a sailing ship in an ornate oval frame on the inner forearm, shown in two side by side photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship in oval frame on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A galleon style sailing ship with full sails rises from waves inside an oval cartouche decorated with scrollwork and a small finial at the top. The linework is bold and solid, with shading in the sails, hull and water, and the frame has a stippled, engraved look. The left photograph is a close view of the forearm, and the right shows the same tattoo from further back with the hand and sleeve visible.

Traditional Forearm Ship Sailing ship Wave Oval frame Scrollwork

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Winter Garden ballroom at Ramsgate smelled of Brylcreem, wet wool and the sea, and on the Saturday Dennis Vosper came in off the coaster Brightwater, he asked me to dance before he asked my name. I told him it was Marjorie. He said it sounded like a ship that had been well kept, and I laughed too loudly for the band to cover.

Keep reading

He worked as a deckhand on a collier that ran coal to Ostend and back, and every dance he gave me a little more of the sea. When the trumpet player took his break, Dennis borrowed a pencil stub and drew on the back of a beer mat: a three-master with every sail set, rising from wave lines inside an oval with curls at the sides and a small spike of a finial on top. 'So the frame keeps her steady,' he said. 'Out there nothing sits still, but the picture does.'

He sailed on the Tuesday tide. The next Saturday he didn't come, and the girl at the cloakroom said the Brightwater had put into Dover with a cracked boiler and gone on to Hull for repairs. I kept dancing with whoever asked, which was a great many men who had never drawn anything in their lives.

In October a letter came with a Portsmouth postmark and a photograph folded inside. He had the same ship inked into his arm by a man who worked from a back room behind a barber's, the same oval and scrollwork as the beer mat, the same wave lines. Underneath he had written: Next dance, you choose the tune. I held the photograph under the cloakroom lamp, and the ship seemed to lean into the wind and keep its course.