Colour tattoo on a forearm of a sailor's head in a cap inscribed Cherie, with a whale and a sunset sea scene inside the head, in neo-trad style.

Sailor head with whale on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bold colour tattoo shows a sailor's head in a cap with the word Cherie in script across the band. Inside the head, a whale breaches over rolling teal waves, with a ship under a red sunset horizon behind it. The black outlines and flat, saturated teal, red and grey shading sit on a neck-and-collar base, with the image centred on the forearm against a black background.

Neo-trad Forearm Sailor Cap Head Whale Ship Sea Sunset Script Wave Collar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hatter's shop in Grimsby smelled of size and steam, and Mrs Okonedo never let the blocks gather dust. Forty wooden heads stood on the shelf above her bench, each shaped to a sailor's skull, and she knew every one by its chip and its nick. The new one came in on a Tuesday with a man called Walter Pell, who wanted a cap that would not blow off in a northerly and who paid her in a brass button and a promise.

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She shaped the felt over the block for three nights. On the fourth she painted the band in the careful copperplate her mother had taught her, because Walter said the word was his sister's name and he had never once managed to say it aloud at sea. Then she stopped, because the block had begun to look back at her, the way wood does when the lamp is low.

Walter came for the cap in March. He turned it in his hands, went quiet, then tipped it and looked inside. Mrs Okonedo looked too. There was a ship on a red horizon, and under it, rolling up through teal water, a whale with its jaw open as if it had been swallowing weather. A thin grey spout rose from its back and fell in silver threads.

"That's the one that took my boat," Walter said.

She had not painted it, and she told him so. He only nodded and set the cap on the counter. When he left, the bell over the door rang twice, though nobody had pushed it.