Traditional style tattoo of a sailing ship with red and yellow accents on a calf, with the words Loose lips sink ships on a banner below.

Sailing ship with banner on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A sailing ship with furled and full sails sits on rough waves, with birds and clouds drawn behind it. Bold black outlines and grey shading give the hull and sails their form, while red and yellow fill the flags, the hull and the details. The phrase Loose lips sink ships is set on a scroll banner beneath the ship, and the design is centred on the calf.

Traditional Calf Ship Sailing ship Cloud Bird Wave Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Harrow Gull was due out of Costen Reach on the Tuesday tide, and by the Monday every tavern from the fish market to the salt sheds knew her hold was packed with powder and her course lay east for the Ninth Shoal. I knew it too, because Pell Garrity had told me over his third pint, then his fourth, and by the time the lamps were lit he had told the whole room, the barmaid included. Nobody thought to lower their voice. Nobody in Costen ever did.

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My grandmother kept the signal tower on Gannet Head, and she taught me early that a lit window carries further than a shout. So I climbed up at dusk with a jar of cold tea and watched the harbour the way she watched it, counting lanterns and reading ships' names against the glow. On the third night a grey cutter with no name on her bow slipped in past the breakwater, and a man in a green oilskin climbed the steps to the Harrow Gull's quay with a purse that clinked. He had come for the same story Pell had handed out for free.

I did not run to the harbour master. I ran to Pell instead, and told him the cutter men had bought his rumour and that it was his name they would want when the Ninth Shoal turned out to be nothing but water. He went the colour of old rope. By morning he had stood on the quay in front of everyone and sworn he had invented the whole thing to make his mates laugh, and the harbour master, who could not abide a strange cutter in his waters, put two constables on the Harrow Gull's gangway until she sailed.

She cleared the breakwater at dawn on the Tuesday tide under full canvas, her red trim bright in the sun, and the cutter lay dark in the bay with its purse unspent. Pell never drank with the sailors again. I kept my own mouth shut after that, which was the hardest work I have ever done in a town built on gossip.