Traditional style tattoo on the back of a hand showing a ship's wheel around green ocean waves, with a banner reading Home Sweet Ocean.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ship's wheel and banner on the hand

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A ship's wheel frames a rounded panel of green and teal waves, with a ribbon banner across the centre reading HOME SWEET OCEAN in black capitals. Bold black outlines, solid fills and soft red shading around the spokes give the piece a classic flash look. Partial tattoo marks are visible on the fingers and at the edge of the frame.

Traditional Hand Ship's wheel Wave Ocean Banner Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis came down to the lock at half eleven with the ship's wheel in a hessian sack, the spokes poking through the weave like the ribs of something drowned. He set it on the bollard without a word and watched the rain pock the black water of the cut under the sodium lamps. I had known him twenty years, long enough to know that when he went quiet it was the Margaret Ann talking.

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She had gone out of Hull with eleven men aboard and come back with nine. The company kept the wheel for the scrap yard, but Dennis got there first on a Tuesday with two quid and a bad temper. Under the spokes, on the hub plate, somebody had scratched the words in neat capitals: HOME SWEET OCEAN. He tapped them with a fingernail the way you'd check a sleeping dog. 'Daft thing to hang on a wall,' I said. 'Aye,' he said. 'The sea never once asked me if I wanted to come home. That's the joke, isn't it.'

He lifted the wheel and gave it a quarter turn, and the shaft creaked with the same low groan the trawler used to make when she came alongside. I didn't tell him I had heard that sound in my sleep for years. I just opened the sluice.

The water rose under the gates and took the wheel off the bollard as gently as a hand. It turned slow as a clock face in the current, spokes catching the lamplight, heading east towards the river and the open dark beyond it. Dennis watched it go with his hands in his pockets until it was only a shine on the water, and then he went home.