Black and grey tattoo of a sailing ship inside a bottle with a rope stopper, on the forearm, in a traditional style with bold outlines and stippled shading.

Ship in a bottle on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sailing ship with full sails and a puff of smoke sits inside a glass bottle, with rolling waves at its base and a rope looping from the stopper and trailing out of the bottle's lower edge. The design uses bold black outlines, hatched sail shading and stippled glass edges in black and grey ink. The bottle runs down the length of the forearm and is centred within the frame.

Traditional Forearm Ship Bottle Sail Rope Wave Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the Sealark sailed on the ninth of Brume and the harbour has not been the same since. Mother asked me to write, as her hands shake too much to hold a pen after the fever. Your bottle still sits on the sill above the kettle, where you left it. I have not moved it, though I dust around it every morning and I have caught myself talking to it when the kettle is slow.

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Master Corran came by on Sunday with news from the Greywater pilots. They saw the Sealark's topsails above a bank of smoke off the Gull Teeth, three days out, running before a wind nobody else could feel. Then the smoke thickened and she was gone, the way a ship goes into a bottle when a careless hand pushes the cork in. Corran says that is only a sailor's way of talking. I told him you were never careless with a cork.

The gulls have been strange since. They gather on the quay at dusk and face east, all of them, like the congregation at Saint Ysolde's waiting on a sermon nobody is going to give. Mother says it is the tide. I say the tide does not usually mind which way a bird is looking.

I have looked at the bottle a great deal these past weeks. The rope that hangs from its stopper is still loose, trailing down past the glass as though someone meant to haul the ship back through the neck and then thought better of it. I have not cut it. If you read this in time, come home and pull it in yourself. Your loving sister, Ilse.