Traditional tattoo on a forearm of a sailor kissing a red-haired woman inside a gold rope heart, with a black and grey ship and the word FAMIGLIA above.

Sailor kissing in a rope heart on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm carries two tattoos: a black and grey ship with a scrolled banner reading FAMIGLIA at the top, and below it a gold rope-edged heart framing a sailor in a cap kissing a woman with red-orange hair against a grey background. The sailor and ship are rendered in bold black outlines with grey shading, while the rope, hair and heart edging use warm colour. The composition is centred on the heart, with the ship and banner filling the upper part of the frame.

Traditional Forearm Ship Banner Sailor Kiss Couple Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hang your coats on the hooks, the lot of you, and mind the fire, because this is the bit where the wind gets in under the door. Sit. Good. Now, Captain Ruggiero Pell, who you'll have heard of if you've drunk in Grimsby, was a man who could not hold a rope without tying it into something. So when the Mary Ann came into Hull with snow on her yards and a boy from Genoa asleep in her forecastle, nobody thought much of it.

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The boy was called Lorenzo, and he spent his first winter scrubbing decks and saying nothing. But every Sunday he went ashore to the chandler's on Humber Street, where a girl with hair the colour of a rusted anchor sold him tarred twine and mended his cuffs for nothing. Her name was Nell Barrow. Her father said she'd marry a fisherman or nobody, and Lorenzo was neither, so he set about being both.

Here's the thing folk forget. A sailor's word is worth exactly as much as the knot he ties with it. So Lorenzo took a length of good hemp and worked a heart out of it on the chandler's bench, one turn at a time, knotting the ends where the point would be. Then he went and stood in the snow until she came to the door.

She saw the heart, then him, and then she laughed so hard she dropped the twine. That was the answer, mind. Not a word. A kiss, right there under the sign, with the whole street pretending not to look. Next spring the Mary Ann sailed without him, and nobody ever saw that rope again. But Nell kept the heart on a nail above her door, and if you go up Humber Street and ask at the chandler's, they'll still show you the nail.