Colour traditional-style tattoo of a grey seagull perched on a rope-wrapped anchor, with the words fall out boy in black script below, on a forearm.

Seagull perched on an anchor with script

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A grey seagull with a yellow beak stands on top of a teal anchor wrapped in tan rope, with red accents on the stock and flukes. Bold dark outlines and flat colour fills define the bird and anchor, and black handwritten script reading fall out boy sits beneath them. The design is centred on a plain skin background with a pale fabric visible at the edge of the frame.

Traditional Lettering Forearm Bird Anchor Rope Script Nautical

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it's loose, and don't lean on that rail. Aye, the gull. You'll have come up for the gull, same as the Hendras lad and the couple from up country with the camera. She's been sat on that anchor since before the breakwater was finished, and she has never once had the decency to move for a visitor.

Keep reading

Her name's scratched on the slate by the door, if you care to squint. Davey Roskilly was the boy who came down the ratlines of the Mary Ellen faster than he meant to, and the mate shouted 'fall out boy' up at him, and it stuck to him the way tar sticks to a man's boots. Nobody here can say why the gull took to him. She came down onto the anchor the afternoon he landed on the stock, bruised from shoulder to heel, and she sat there with a crust in her beak and watched him cry into the coil of rope. Every morning after that she was on the flukes when he walked down to the quay.

The harbour master wanted her shot. Davey's mother told him he could try it himself and see how he got on with the rest of the village. So the gull stayed, and Davey went to sea at sixteen, and the gull stayed here anyway, faithful as a parish clerk. Letters came back with the boats for forty years, and not one of them said a word about her, which is how you know a man was happy.

The last Michaelmas he came home, grey as a cormorant and twice as thin, and he walked straight past his mother's door and down to the quay. The gull was on the anchor. He sat on the bollard beside it, and neither of them moved for the rest of the tide.