Traditional colour tattoo of a three-masted sailing ship on waves with a lettered banner and a flower, on the outer forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ship with banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship with grey-shaded sails and a red and yellow hull sits on blue waves, with a red pennant at the top and seagulls in a cloud behind it. A lettered scroll banner and a red and yellow flower with green leaves sit along the bottom of the design. Bold black outlines and solid fills of red, yellow, green and blue dominate, with the sails shaded in greys, and the design fills the forearm.

Traditional Forearm Sailing ship Ship Wave Cloud Banner Flower Flag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pour yourself another, and mind the draught from the door, because the wind's gone round to the west and a proper tale wants a bit of weather. Thirty years I've kept this house above the harbour wall, and every lodger who stops long enough asks about the painting in the front parlour. The Greyling Bess, three masts, sails gone the colour of pipe smoke, hull as red as a pillar box with a yellow rail. Her pennant was always out, even in a calm, because her master said a ship with nothing to say for herself might as well stay in dock.

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Old Amos Hendry sailed her out of Bristol with a cargo of salt and a crew who were mostly lads from the Welsh valleys who had never seen the sea until the Friday. The gulls followed her past Lundy for three days, and the cook, who believed they were drowned sailors, tossed them scraps of hard tack every dinner until the mate threatened to put him ashore at Ilfracombe. Amos never said whether he believed it. He only ever looked at the birds the way a man looks at a debt he means to pay.

They came home in a fog that smelt of coal smoke and wet sheep. The Bess came up the channel with her sails furled and her flag still flying, which the harbourmaster said was the strangest thing he'd seen in forty years, because nobody flies a flag they have no right to. Amos carried his sea-chest up this very stair and asked for a room with a view of the water. We gave him the one at the top.

He never went back to sea. Every night after, he counted the gulls from that window, and when he'd lost count he started again, and I'd hear him through the floorboards, murmuring numbers like a man saying his prayers.