Black and grey realism sleeve tattoo on a man's arm, showing a sailing ship, a compass rose and an anchor, with the words Love, friends and Family.

Ship, compass and anchor sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows a large sailing ship with detailed rigging and sails across the upper arm, with a compass rose and a partly visible anchor lower down the forearm. The shading is soft and smooth, with strong contrast in the ship and a faded, misty background, and the words Love, friends and Family are set between the motifs. The image is entirely black and grey and is framed from the chest down, showing the arm against a maroon t-shirt.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Sailing ship Compass rose Anchor Rope Lettering Love Friend Family Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The figurehead was still wrapped in sacking when my father hauled her up the shingle, cursing the gulls that had followed him from the slip. She was a painted woman with a fan in one hand, and he said the rigging would need a day's work before she was fit to sail. I told him the Marigold had sailed without her before, and he gave me the look that meant I had said too much.

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We rigged her through that autumn, the whole yard turning out on Saturdays with tar on their hands and bread in their pockets. Mr Pell the sailmaker stitched the topsails by lamplight and sang badly to keep himself awake. My father spent his evenings at the bench with the brass compass that had been his own father's, its rose scored by a crack he never had mended, turning it over and over as if the north might change its mind.

In March the Marigold went out on the ebb with nine men aboard and came back on the flood with four. The anchor had dragged in the blow off the Gunfleet, and the cable had parted with a sound like a rifle shot, he told the inquest, though he had been at the wheel and could not have heard it at all. He said little after that. He hung the compass on a nail by the door where anyone coming in could see it.

Beneath it, on the slate where the tide tables used to go, he chalked the names of the four men who had come home, and under them the three words he could not stop writing: love, friends, family. My mother rubbed the slate clean every Sunday. Every Monday he wrote them again, in the same careful capitals, until the chalk wore down to nothing.