Pencil sketch of a sailing ship inside a bottle with a rope-wound cork, drawn on white paper as a tattoo design.

Ship in a bottle pencil sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A graphite pencil drawing of a three-masted sailing ship inside a bottle, with its rope and cork shown at the neck. The linework is fairly loose and sketchy, with soft shading on the glass and the bottle's base to suggest volume. The drawing is in greys on plain white paper, photographed at an angle with tape visible at the corners.

Ship Bottle Rope Sail

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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

Nobody in Hollin Bank believed a lad who went down the pit at fourteen could rig a barque through a neck no wider than my thumb. Dad said it was a waste of good candle grease. Mam said nothing, which in our house was louder.

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I built the Marigold over one long winter, on the kitchen table once the lamp was turned down. Tweezers from my sister's sewing tin, a bent darning needle, spruce from a crate that had carried pit props. Each mast I stepped with a thread of linen dipped in glue, and each sail I cut from a Woodbine packet, folded thin as cigarette paper. Nobody was allowed to breathe near the rigging.

Then the cage jammed at Number Four, and for nine hours we heard the men knocking on the steel from below, one knock for yes. Old Tom Pryce knocked back through the whole night without stopping. When they brought him up he asked after the ship before he asked after his own hands.

I gave it to him the Sunday he came home in a wheeled chair. He held the bottle to the window, squinted at the cork and the coil of rope at its neck, and said the sea was a fair step from Hollin Bank. I told him the sea didn't need to be near. He pressed the cork back in with his thumb, the way you'd close an eye, and set the Marigold on the sill where the evening light off the heap could find her sails.