Traditional style flash drawing of a sailing ship framed by red roses, a yellow butterfly and crabs, drawn on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ship, roses and butterfly flash design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A coloured drawing of a sailing ship with full sails set, enclosed in a rope ring and surrounded by red and pink roses with green leaves. A yellow and orange butterfly, crabs and an ornate skull-like form fill the edges, with fine hatching and grey shading on the ship and sails. The design is shown flat and centred on cream paper.

Traditional Ship Sailing ship Rose Butterfly Crab Rope Skull Leaves

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

Hold the lamp closer, Tam, because Gideon the cook swore on his mother's grave that the butterfly was the reason we ever made Falmouth, and he never swore lightly, not even with the rum in him. We were nine days becalmed off the Lizard in the brig Hesper Vale. The water casks had gone green, the biscuit was thick with weevils, and the crabs came up through the bilge scratching at the ballast as if they meant to take the ship themselves.

Keep reading

On the ninth morning a butterfly came down on the windlass, yellow and orange as a marigold, and sat there with its wings open to the sun. Forty miles from any land, mind you. Captain Pellow wanted it over the side with the rest of us if the wind didn't come. Eli Marsh, our bosun, stood between them with his forearms bare. He had roses inked on them from a parlour in South Shields, and he never once let a man forget it. He said the thing had ridden the wind from somewhere and would ride it back. Then he unpicked a fathom of old hemp, tied it into a ring and hung it round the bow, and gave the sails the last bucket of fresh water, which I thought was madness.

By dusk the south-westerly was humming in the rigging. The butterfly lifted off the windlass and went ahead of us like a lantern, and we ran up the Carrick Roads with the sails singing. Eli took no pay that voyage. He bought a fresh coil of rope in Falmouth and asked Gideon to keep the old ring on the galley shelf. It's still there, Tam, with a crab's claw knotted into it, and it still nips at any fool who reaches too close.