Traditional flash design of a sailor in a cap kissing a woman with a finger waves hairstyle, framed by a rope circle with a red poppy and leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sailor and woman kissing flash

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a sailor in a white cap and collar kissing a woman with dark wavy hair and closed eyes, held in an embrace. The bold black outlines and flat fills of red, orange, olive and yellow sit within a rope border, with a red poppy, leaves and radiating lines in the lower right. The composition is centred on the couple and drawn on cream paper with brushes and pencils visible at the edge of the frame.

Traditional Sailor Kiss Woman Couple Rope Poppy Flower Leaves Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are late for the last ferry, so you run the length of the Pier Head with your cap in your fist, rope burning in your palm where the bollard line slipped. The lamps along the Mersey are already smeared with fog, and somewhere behind the warehouses a dance band is folding up its last number. She said she would wait at the gate by the Customs shed. She said it the way she says everything, as if the words were a dare she expected you to lose.

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She is there. Of course she is, under the single bulb, a poppy pinned to her coat the colour of a struck match. She does not scold you. She takes the rope from your hand, winds it twice round her wrist, and tells you the ship sailed at six without you and the bosun has already written you down as adrift. You laugh, because there is nothing else to do with a night like this, and then you stop laughing, because she has stepped in close and the fog has gone quiet around you both.

The kiss is short and it tastes of tobacco and the cold tin of the railing. When she pulls back she is already unpinning the poppy, pressing it into the gap of your collar where the white cloth meets your neck. "Keep this," she says. "Men come back for less."

You do not tell her about the orders for the morning, or that the dawn over the water will come up in thin orange spokes, and you will not be sure whether it is the sun. You just hold the flower against your chest and let her count the hours for you, one lamp at a time, until the first gull finds the quay.