Traditional colour tattoo of a three-masted sailing ship with a red hull, clouds and birds, above a banner reading Homeward Bound, on a forearm.

Sailing ship with Homeward Bound banner on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship with full tan sails and a red hull sails over blue waves, framed by white clouds, a blue sky halo and small birds. A yellow banner below the ship reads HOMEWARD BOUND in black capitals. Bold black outlines and soft shading give the ship depth, and the palette is limited to yellow, red, blue and black on pale skin.

Traditional Forearm Sailing ship Ship Cloud Bird Wave Banner Sail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ship came into Penhallow harbour on a Tuesday, which everyone agreed was the wrong day for a ship, and it had no name painted on its bow. Old Mrs Tregenza said that was because it had given its name up at the Cape and only wanted its sails looked after now. Her grandson Jory went down to the quay with a bucket of tar and a rag, because his mother had told him a ship with no name needed someone to mind its rigging.

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The captain was a short man with a red beard gone white at the chin. He did not ask for coal or water. He asked whether the tin men still went down the shafts at Wheal Dolly, and Jory said they did, and the captain nodded as if that were the answer to a riddle he had carried a long way. Then he gave Jory a banner of yellow cloth folded into a square, and told him to sew the words on it before the tide turned, because the ship could not leave until somebody had said them aloud.

Jory did not know what words the captain meant, so he stitched the only ones he had heard in every sea shanty his grandfather ever hummed: HOMEWARD BOUND, in black letters as tall as his hand. When he tied the banner to the stern rail, the birds that had been circling the mast settled on it all at once, and the ship slid out past the breakwater with its sails full of a wind nobody else could feel.

That evening the miners came up from Wheal Dolly covered in red dust and found the quay swept clean. Jory sat on the wall with his tar bucket between his feet. Far out, a white shape was still turning towards the west, and the gulls over the harbour had begun to fly in the same direction.