Colour traditional tattoo of a large sailing ship on rolling blue waves, with clouds, gulls and a red flag, across the upper arm and shoulder.

Sailing ship with waves on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large sailing ship with billowing sails and a red pennant fills the frame, set against stylised clouds and seagulls. Bold black outlines define the hull, rigging and sea, with flat fills of yellow, grey, red and blue. The design wraps around the upper arm and shoulder, with the waves forming a curved base beneath the ship.

Traditional Upper arm Sailing ship Ship Sail Wave Sea Cloud Flag Rigging

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marguerite Ashby had been three weeks out of Gravesend when the cook first swore the ship was haunted, and by the fourth week nobody aboard would argue with him. Old Tobias Quill, who had sailed the Horn twice and come back both times with fewer teeth, said it was only the sails talking in the wind, the way canvas does when it has been wet and dried a hundred times. But the topsails sang a note none of us had heard before, a low hum like a bottle blown across the mouth, and it came loudest at the change of watch.

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On the morning we raised the grey coast of the Falklands, the mate sent me aloft to clear a fouled halyard. I was eighteen and proud of my legs. Halfway up the main shrouds the wind caught the great red pennant at the masthead and snapped it straight out, and I saw, beyond the rigging and the rolling cloud, a second ship keeping station a mile off, every sail full, and not one soul moving on her deck. Gulls wheeled over her like ash.

I came down with the halyard cleared and said nothing. That night Quill sat beside me on the forecastle and pressed a tin of tobacco into my palm. He told me the hum was the ship we had left behind in the Thames, still searching for the crew who had taken the cheaper passage. Then he laughed until he coughed, and I never could tell whether he was joking. The next morning the second ship was gone, and the wind had dropped to nothing, and the sea lay flat and blue as a plate all the way to the edge of the world.