Black and grey tattoo of a sailing ship across the ribs with roses, feathers and an anchor on the hip and thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship, roses and anchor on ribs and thigh

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A sailing ship with full rigging runs up the side of the ribs, above a cluster of peony-style roses, feathers and an anchor on the hip and upper thigh. The work uses fine linework with stippled shading and dotted detail, and the ship's sails are lightly shaded against the skin. The image is entirely black and grey and is framed on the torso and hip against a white brick wall.

Botanical Dotwork Ribs Thigh Sailing ship Ship Rose Peony Flower Anchor Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Walter Pring has been awake since two, asking the time in the voice of a man checking a ship's bell. You bring him water and he waves it away. 'Not water, love. Give us a biro and the back of that chart.' You hand over the chewed pen from the desk, and he flattens the drug chart on the overbed table and starts drawing with his left hand, the right one still strapped to a line that runs up to a bag of saline swinging on its hook.

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The ship comes first, a full-rigged barque with her topsails clewed up like washing on a line. He is fussy about the rigging. 'Every rope has a name. Halyard, brace, bowline. You count them and you never lose the ship.' He shades the sails with the tip of the pen, tiny dots that he says are wind rather than canvas. The lines run down past the dosage boxes and the patient's name in capitals, and you realise nothing on this ward has ever been drawn so slowly.

At four the alarm goes off in bay three and you leave him for twenty minutes. When you come back he has added roses beneath the ship, fat peony heads crowded together, feathers curling off their edges, and at the bottom an anchor with its flukes freckled in dots. 'Every port had a rose,' he says. 'The anchor was for the ones who didn't come home.' He doesn't sound sad about it, only exact.

He tears the chart along the perforations, the safest thing he has done all night, and presses it into your hand. 'Don't let them file it.' You fold it twice and slide it into your cardigan pocket beside the pen. By six the window has gone from black to the colour of wet slate, and somewhere below the car park a van reverses with its alarm going. You stand at the window with the drawing held against your chest, and the anchor is the only thing in the building that holds still.