Black line-art flash sheet of twelve zodiac-style designs, including an archer, a ram, a fish, a lion, a crab, a scorpion and a pair of scales, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Set of zodiac-style line designs

Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of twelve black line drawings arranged in a grid on a white background. The designs include a bow-drawing archer, a ram's head, a fish, a lion's head, a crab, a pair of scales and a scorpion, along with a few figure and horn shapes. The lines are smooth, bold and mostly unshaded, with flowing curves and a simple, stylised look.

Zodiac Ram Fish Lion Crab Scale Scorpion Goat Horn Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bosun gives you the twelve signs on a scrap of chart paper the week the Halcyon leaves Falmouth, and you spend the first fortnight out of the Azores copying them onto the back of a ledger because the ink is the only thing aboard that doesn't sweat. The archer first, then the ram with its curled horns, the fish, the lion. By the time the trades pick up off Madeira you have the scorpion down so well that Corrigan asks if he can borrow it for his own arm.

Keep reading

Nobody teaches you the tails. You learn them from the sea itself: the swell comes in long and unbroken, and the line of a wave is the line you want, bold at the belly and thin where it lifts. You stop trying to be neat. Ada, the cook, who has rounded the Horn twice, watches you draw a crab in spilt flour on the galley table and says it looks like it is trying to walk sideways out of the page, which you take as praise.

Off the Cape Verde islands the wind dies for four days. The water goes flat as a pewter plate, and the twins on the scales, the two figures with their balanced arms, are all anyone can look at over the rail. You sketch the scales again and again, weighing the mizzen against the foremast, until the Captain asks what you are measuring. You tell him nothing. He laughs and leaves a pencil on your bunk.

When the wind comes back it comes from the south-west, hard and sudden, and the Halcyon heels so far that the lion's mane of spray goes over the bow. You are holding the chart in your teeth when the scorpion on the page curls its tail, and you realise the drawing was never about the creature at all. It was about the moment you stop drawing and start holding on.