Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a sailing ship in a glass bottle wrapped in rope, with an orange sunset, on the upper arm.

Ship in a bottle on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sailing ship inside a glass bottle sits at the centre of the design, its rigging and sails outlined in dark ink, with a rope wrapped around the bottle's neck. Behind the ship an orange sunset, stylised waves and small seagulls fill the glass, and rope coils run along the lower edge. Bold black outlines and saturated orange, green, red and tan fills give it a classic neo-traditional look, with part of an anchor visible at the upper left.

Neo-trad Upper arm Sailing ship Rope Bottle Sunset Wave Anchor

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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

You want to know how the ship got in the bottle, and everyone asks that first, so I'll tell you straight and save the fuss. Nobody put it in. It was built in there, mast by mast, by my grandfather's brother Cyril, who had lost two fingers to a winch at Whitby and said the bottle was the only thing that would keep him honest. He worked through a winter in the back room of the Anchor Inn, with a lamp hung from the beam and a pair of bent tweezers, and every evening he'd come out to the bar and say the sails were drying.

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The rope was the hard part. Hemp won't lie still in a glass neck, so he soaked it in tea to take the stiffness out, then coiled it round the mouth like a tourniquet until it set. Mrs Thwaite from the chandlery swore he'd used her good twine, and she never did forgive him for the twelve yards he took.

When the spring tide came in he finally sealed it and carried the bottle down to the slipway in a tea towel. He stood there while the gulls wheeled over the bay, the sun dropping orange behind the breakwater, and he said, 'There, she's sailing, and she'll never sink.' Then he dropped it on the stones and it broke clean in two. Mrs Thwaite laughed until she had to sit down on the bollard.

So the ship you see on the arm is the one Cyril made the second time, in a bottle he bought from the Methodist jumble for a penny. He never got the rigging right, and he always said the sails were too close to the glass. That is the whole secret, my son. Build it small enough to fit and it still won't go anywhere, but you'll have something to look at on a wet afternoon.