Colour and black and grey tattoo of a sailor in a cap embracing a figure, framed by a ship's wheel over a red circle, on the upper arm.

Sailor embrace inside a ship's wheel on an arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A sailor in a cap embraces a figure in light clothing, both rendered in realistic shading in greys and skin tones. They are set within a black ship's wheel with detailed spokes and a red circle behind them. The linework is bold and the red fill gives the composition a strong focal point against the grey shading.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Mersey ever agreed about the wheel. Ada said her Tom had carved the spokes himself during the long dog watches out of Liverpool, but Tom's mother swore he'd bought it off a junk man in Birkenhead for two shillings and a bottle of stout. What everybody agreed on was the red. The sun went down behind the cranes every evening that August the colour of a pillar box, and Tom said that was the only thing in England worth painting.

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He shipped out on the Thursday with his kit bag over one shoulder and his cap pushed back, and Ada walked the length of the landing stage beside him without saying anything at all. At the gangway he stopped, set the bag down, and kissed her in full view of a customs man, two stevedores and a woman selling tea from an urn on a trolley. The stevedores whistled. The customs man pretended not to look. Ada said afterwards it was the only time she had ever seen him in a hurry to be somewhere and not wanting to go.

The ship came back in October with half her paintwork gone and Tom's left hand bandaged. He came up the landing stage slower than he had gone down it, and Ada was waiting in the same coat, holding a tin of Bovril she had carried for three hours so she would have something to do with her hands. He never told her what had happened out past the Bar. He only said the wheel had held, and that the sun had been red every single night, the same as at home, and that he had watched for it the whole way across.

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