Black and grey tattoo of a three-masted ship inside a bottle on the inner forearm, shaded with fine engraved hatching.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ship in a bottle on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship with full sails sits inside a bottle, with its hull resting on stylised waves that run into the bottle's neck. The linework is bold with dense parallel hatching across the sails, hull and glass, giving an engraved, woodcut-like effect. The design is shown in black and grey ink, filling the length of the forearm with the bottle's outline centred on the skin.

Traditional Forearm Ship Sailing ship Bottle Sail Wave

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 bottle came up in the crab pot on a Tuesday, wedged between a lump of kelp and a boot with no laces. Joan knew the cork before she knew the glass. Her father had sealed every bottle with tarred twine and a dab of red wax, and he had been dead nine years.

Keep reading

Inside, folded until it had gone the colour of weak tea, was a sheet of school paper. The hand was round and careful, pressed hard enough to dent the lines. Dear Papa, it began, I have put the ship in so you will know the way. Mam says you are on a long voyage and will come home when the wind changes. Please come home for my birthday. Your loving daughter, Joan, aged eleven.

She had forgotten throwing it. She had forgotten the ship he drew on the glass for that birthday, the three masts hatched in with a steel nib until the sails looked carved from wood, the waves curling into the neck of the bottle the way the tide did at the slip. She stood on the wall with the sheet in one hand and the grey sea beneath her, and understood that the ship had never been meant to come home. It had only been meant to show her where the sea went.

She took the red wax stick from her apron pocket, the one she had carried since the funeral, and wrote a fresh sheet on the back of the old one. I am twenty now, and I have stopped waiting up. She pressed the cork in with her thumb, the way he had taught her, and threw it past the breakers where the current runs north, towards whatever had kept him.