Black ink ship in a bottle tattoo on the inner upper arm, with a sailing ship drawn in outline and light shading.

Ship in a bottle on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A sailing ship with full sails and rigging sits inside a bottle outline on the inner upper arm. The linework is dark and uniform, with shading on the sails and hull, and a small block of lettering with a date sits on the bottle's base. The photograph is taken straight on against a pale wall, with the arm filling most of the frame.

Upper arm Ship Bottle Sail Rigging Wave Lettering

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 cook's mate has already burned the first batch of biscuit, so you are the one scraping the pan when the bell goes for the afternoon watch. Hold the ladle steady, the purser says, and do not let the brine slop over the rail where the gulls can get at it. You have been aboard the Mercy Vane eleven weeks and you still flinch at the groan the timbers make when the swell lifts her.

Keep reading

The galley is a box of hot iron below the waterline, and its only window is a scuttle above the stove that shows nothing but a square of grey. Hung beside it is a bottle the carpenter made from an old gin flask, with the Vane inside under full canvas. He cut the rigging from tarred thread and painted the date on the glass base, the month you signed on. Every morning you wipe the glass so the sails look white instead of smoky.

On the sixth night a wave came over the bow, and the bottle slipped from its hook and skidded across the boards. You went down on your knees to find it. The glass was whole. The ship inside had come loose from the glue at its base and lay on its side, masts snapped flat, the little sea of dried paint cracked around it like the bed of a dry pond.

You set it back on its hook without a word. Nobody asked you to, and nobody needed to. In the morning the carpenter looked at it, looked at you, and handed over a pot of glue and a long fine wire. You spent the whole forenoon coaxing the hull upright again, one sail at a time, while the galley fire ticked and the sea kept on lifting the Vane towards the light.