Photograph of a sailing ship tattoo on the inner forearm, drawn with loose black brush strokes and ochre wash, with black ink splashes around the hull and sails.

Sailing ship with ink splashes on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a three-masted sailing ship with its sails filled and rigging drawn in fine black lines. Bold black brush strokes curl around the top of the ship and drip down the lower half, while soft ochre and brown washes fill the sails and hull. The design is centred on a forearm against a dark background, with the ship running vertically along the arm.

Forearm Ship Sailing ship Sail Rigging Brush stroke Watercolour

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink on the chandler's board had run in the damp, so Mrs Okonedo dipped her brush again before she would let Tobias copy the bill. Outside, the Limehouse fog pressed its yellow face against the shutters and somebody's dog barked at the tide. Tobias had come up from the hold of the Perseverance that morning with his cuffs black to the elbow and a story he would not tell anyone, least of all the mate who had sent him ashore with two shillings and a note for the owners.

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He pinned the bill to the nail above the counter and sat on the stool by the stove, where the fire had been let go down to a red eye. The wind came off the river in gusts and set the sign outside creaking, and every creak sounded like a block running through a sheave. He had grown up with that noise. It was the only lullaby his mother knew. He thought about the rigging, all those fine lines drawn tight against the sky, and how a sailor could read a whole ship in them the way a clerk reads a column of figures.

At four bells the door opened and the mate stood there, dripping, with the Perseverance's charts under one arm. He did not say sorry and neither did Tobias. He only set the charts on the counter, unrolled the top sheet, and put a thumb on a dark smear of ink where the coast should have been. Tobias looked at it a long while, then at the wet black spill of it across the paper, and understood that the ship had not gone down after all. It had simply been drawn somewhere else.