Black line drawing of a sailing ship above a curling banner reading IT IS NOT DOWN ON ANY MAP TRUE PLACES NEVER ARE, with waves below, in a traditional style.

Ship and banner quote design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a three-masted sailing ship sits at the top, with a scrolled banner wrapping down the centre of the design. The banner carries a four-line quotation in capitals, and waves and a wave crest sit beneath it. The design is rendered in bold black linework with no shading or colour, on a plain white background.

Traditional Ship Banner Ribbon Wave Sea Sail Quote Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, the pair of you, and mind the draught from the back door, because Mrs Pell never fixed it and never will. You want the story of Tobias Quill, who lodged in the top room of this house the winter the Hesper went down off Crowder Point. He paid his board in charts. Every morning he came down to breakfast with a fresh one rolled under his arm, and every morning Mrs Pell would ask him where he'd been, and every morning he'd say, "Somewhere it isn't."

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Now the chart he was proudest of showed a harbour that nobody had ever sailed into. He had drawn the headland, the lighthouse, even the gulls sitting on the jetty rail. When the young fishermen laughed at him in the Anchor, he tapped his pen on the table and said the thing he always said, that it is not down on any map, and true places never are. They thought he was a fool, right up until the February gale, when the Maud Catherine lost her rudder off the point and her skipper, a stubborn man called Garrow, steered by the charts in his head, because the real coast had shifted under the storm.

Garrow was the one who swore he saw lights where Quill's harbour should be. Quill rowed out into the dark with a lantern and a coil of rope, and nobody ever saw the harbour itself, only a long grey swell and a small boat coming home.

Pass the teapot, would you. I'll tell you the rest tomorrow, when the tide has turned and the fire's gone low.