Realistic black and grey tattoo of two sailing ships on churning water beside a rocky outcrop, spanning a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailing ships and rocks across a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers most of the back, showing a listing sailing ship with torn rigging on the left and a smaller ship on a distant rock on the right. Rocks and dark shoreline sit in the lower right, with soft smudged clouds above and fine ripples on the water. The shading is smooth and tonal, with crisp rigging lines against soft grey washes, and the ink is entirely black and grey.

Realism Back Ship Sailing ship Sea Rock Cloud

Find an artist for this

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 Halcyon Vane had been listing for three days before the mate admitted she would roll, and by then her mainmast had gone over the side in a tangle of torn rigging that dragged her wallowing toward the Scatterwrack reef. Jem Tolley, nineteen and certain he could swim, was ordered into the jolly boat with the cook's box and two casks of water. He rowed away without looking back at the hull, because his father had told him never to watch a ship die.

Keep reading

Three miles off, the Gannet had already fetched up on the Little Mare, her bow pointing at the sky like an accusing finger, and her crew had taken to the rock with a lamp. They signalled with a shirt tied to a spar. Jem steered for the shadow of the big stones where the swell broke white and then quiet, and there old Nance Carew met them, standing in her doorway on the shingle with a lantern and a pot of stewed tea.

She had kept that shore for fifty years and held a theory about wrecks. The sea never took what it could not keep, she said, and it always left something behind to remember it by. When Jem asked what the Vane had left, she pointed at the water, where the ripples ran in fine grey lines toward the cliff. A ship's name, she said, is written in the swell until the tide gets bored of it.

He never saw the Vane again. Years later he took a berth on the mail packet and sailed past the Scatterwrack on a clear morning. There on the black rocks stood the Gannet's mast, bleached and leaning, with a small cloud drifting over it like a smudged thumbprint. Jem raised his cap anyway, though the only thing on the reef was a gull picking at a loose strand of rope.