Black ink drawing of a sailing ship inside a laurel wreath, with the script words The Lady Daisy and a small star below, presented as a tattoo design.

Sailing ship with laurel wreath

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A three-masted sailing ship with furled and unfurled sails sits at the centre of a laurel wreath of leaves and small stars. The hull has a band of solid black triangles, and the ship is drawn with fine hatched linework and dotted shading. Handwritten script reading The Lady Daisy sits beneath the wreath, above a five-pointed star, all in black ink on white.

Fine line Botanical Sailing ship Ship Laurel wreath Leaves Star Script Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Lady Daisy had been built up the estuary by men who swore she would never sink, and for thirty years she did not. Her master's wife, Maud Tregarthen, kept a boarding house on the cliff above Porthkerris, and every night the ship was at sea she set a lamp in the upper window. Her husband had told her the ship would find its way home by that light, and she did not stop when he went down off the Lizard in the wet spring the chapel roof fell in.

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The lodgers came and went. A surveyor from Bristol paid for three weeks and asked whether the ship was real. Maud said she was as real as the bread. One November a boy called Thomas Penrose carried the coal up the back stairs and asked why the star painted on the ship's flag had five points when the one over the chapel door had six. Maud said the sea counted differently, and gave him a heel of bread with dripping.

On the night of the great fog the lamp burned until dawn. Then there was a sail in the bay, three masts, the canvas furled as neatly as a letter. No one hailed her. When the boats went out, the deck was wet and empty, but laid across the wheel was a wreath of bay leaves, dry as paper, with a small star pressed between two of them.

Maud carried the wreath up to the window and hung it on the nail beside the lamp. She never said who had brought the ship in, and the lodgers, who had the story from the fishermen, did not ask. The Lady Daisy lay at anchor until spring, then went out on the tide and was not seen again, though the lamp stayed lit every night until Maud was too old for the stairs.