Black line drawing of a sailing ship, tentacles, waves and an anchor with a banner reading I am the captain of my soul, shown as a traditional-style tattoo design.

Ship and anchor flash with captain banner

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a three-masted sailing ship rises above a banner lettered with the words I am the captain of my soul. Tentacles wrap around a ship's anchor at the base, and stylised waves and swirls fill the spaces around the central panel. The design uses bold outlines and fine hatching in black ink on a plain white background, with no colour.

Traditional Ship Anchor Tentacle Banner Wave Lettering Sail Swirl

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

The cable was already singing when you reached the bow, the bronze anchor hanging off the stern like a drowned man's fist, and something under the hull had taken its flukes in eight pale arms. Lysandros stood at the rail holding a lamp he had no reason to hold. He had bought this grain ship in Ostia with his brother's debts, and the words he had paid a scribe to paint on her stern board were the only thing he owned outright: I AM THE CAPTAIN OF MY SOUL. The letters were so crooked that the dockhands called her the Lame Oath.

Keep reading

"Cut it," he said. You did not answer at once. You had read those words every morning for a year, and each morning they had sounded like a boast from a man who had never been wrong about the wind. Now he wanted you to be the one who decided whether the boast held. The octopus rose beside the hull, its eye the colour of old wine, and it did not pull. It only waited, the way the sea waits, as if it had all the time that men pretend they have.

You thought of the scribe, who had charged him by the letter and cheated him on the Ms. You thought of the captain's hand on the tiller in the storm off Crete, steady when everyone else was praying. Then you took the knife from your belt and went to the cable.

The anchor went down into the dark with its arms still wrapped around it, and the Lame Oath rode free on the swell. In the morning Lysandros found you at the stern, scraping at his paint with your thumbnail, and he did not stop you.