Black line drawing flash of a cartoon sailor in a rowboat inside a circle, with the words ROW ROW ROW YOUR BOAT and THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, shown without a placement on the body.

Sailor in a rowboat flash design

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a cartoon sailor in a peaked cap with an anchor badge, raising both hands with one middle finger up, seated in a rowboat with an oar and a small pennant flag. Waves are drawn in layered scalloped lines beneath the boat, enclosed in a dotted circular border. The lettering curves around the top and bottom of the circle on a plain cream background, and the drawing uses only black ink with no colour.

Sailor Wave Anchor Flag Lettering Circle Cartoon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rowing boat on Hollins Park lake had a seam that wept on the port side, and Dennis Pyle had rowed it every Sunday for eleven years, which he considered a fine record for a man who had never owned so much as a bath toy. His grandson Kieran stood on the jetty with a bucket, sent down to bail, and watched the captain's cap with its tarnished anchor badge drift out past the reeds towards the ducks.

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"Come back in, Grandad. The man from the council is coming round with a clipboard."

"Let him come," Dennis called back. "I've weathered worse than a clipboard." He pulled the oars in long, lazy strokes, singing the only song he knew all the way through, the nursery rhyme about gently down the stream, though he changed the words in every verse so that it ended on a line his late wife would have swatted him for. The swans turned their heads. An old woman on the bench laughed until she dropped her crossword.

The clipboard arrived at last, carried by a young woman in a lanyard who stood at the water's edge with the patience of someone paid by the hour. Dennis raised both hands above his head in the manner of a man surrendering to nothing whatsoever, and she waved back, which he had not expected. Then she pointed at the bucket Kieran had abandoned, half full and rocking on the boards, and at the water that had found its way up the steps.

By the time the boat was tied up, the bottom had two inches of lake in it and the captain was soaked to the knees. He handed his grandson the oar with great ceremony. "Your turn, boy. Every good sailor needs a leaking vessel to learn on." Kieran took it, and out on the water a duck began to quack the first line of the song, badly, in time with him.