Black and grey traditional tattoo of a sailing ship, a lotus flower and an anchor across the upper arm, shown in two photographs side by side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship, lotus and anchor on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full-sailed ship with billowing sails and rigging fills the upper part of the arm, with a large lotus flower beneath its hull and a ship's anchor at the bottom. The outlines are bold and the sails and flower petals are filled with soft grey shading and some darker areas. The diptych shows the same arm from two angles, and the tattoo is shown in sepia-toned black and grey ink.

Traditional Upper arm Sailing ship Lotus Anchor Sail Rigging

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

02:10. Ward 7 is quiet apart from the infusion pumps and Mr Okafor's radio, turned low so it sounds like surf. Dad would have called this the dog watch, though he never let me stand one on the trawler. I keep my own log the way he taught me: time in the margin, weather in the middle, anything that changed in the right-hand column. Tonight the weather is fog, which on a ward means the windows have gone the colour of weak tea and nobody can see the car park.

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03:40. Bed nine's daughter came back with a flask and a bag of satsumas and sat holding her mother's hand without speaking, the way you'd hold a rope in a swell. I told her the anchor doesn't need hauling up to be useful, only set and trusted. She looked at me as if I'd gone soft in the head. Maybe I had. Dad kept a lotus carved on his tea caddy and used to say it was for the flowers that grow out of mud and still open. I thought that was sentimental nonsense until I'd spent eleven years on wards full of people who came in through the worst weather of their lives.

05:15. Bed nine's mother held on until the window went grey. The flask was still warm on the tray when we moved her. I wrote the time in the margin and the weather in the middle: clearing, wind light, sea calm. Then I left the right-hand column empty, because nothing had changed that I could log, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise.

06:02. Handover. I'll tell Priya about the satsumas and the fog, and she'll roll her eyes at the dog watch business. Dad would say a log is only honest if it records the quiet hours too. The sun is coming up over the car park, and for the first time all night I can see the cranes on the dock, dark against the light, standing exactly where they were when I came on shift.