Black and grey realism tattoo on the upper arm of a sailor in a cap embracing a woman in white, set inside a ship's wheel with a red circle behind them.

Sailor and nurse kiss inside a ship's wheel

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A sailor in a cap embraces a woman in a light coloured dress, the two figures shown in a kiss. They sit within a dark ship's wheel outline, with a solid red circle behind them. The shading is smooth and detailed in greys and blacks, with red used only for the background disc.

Realism Upper arm Sailor Kiss Woman Ship's wheel Couple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wheel came off the Kestrel the week they paid her off, and Tom Pelling carried it up the hill on his shoulder because the yard man said nobody would miss a cracked steering wheel. It had eight spokes, one of them mended with copper wire, and a brass plate worn to a smudge. He leant it against the gatepost of Ruth Haddow's house and sat on the wall to wait for her shift to end at the fever ward.

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She came up the street with her cape over one arm and her shoes in her other hand, because her feet were blistered from the stairs. She saw the wheel before she saw him. "You've stolen a boat," she said. "Only the steering," he said. "The boat's still in the Medway, rotting nicely." She laughed, and then she didn't, because he had not smiled once since the Kestrel came home with her bridge stove in and four men fewer than she left with.

He told her the truth about the wheel. On the northern run, in the dark, the helmsman had held her on course by feel alone, and every time Tom put his hands on those spokes he remembered that he had not been the one holding them. He wanted something in her street that turned true for nobody but the two of them. Ruth laid her palm flat on a spoke and left it there until the cold went out of the iron.

Behind them, the lamp came on in her front room, under a red shade her mother had bought at a market in Lowestoft. Its glow fell through the window and sat round the wheel the way a sun sits behind a ship at dusk. Ruth said he could keep the wheel, so long as he hung it where she could see it from the kitchen sink.