Pencil sketch of a tattoo design with a ship's wheel enclosing a sailing ship, a flower below, and the words DARLIN IM NOT above and COMIN HOME below.

Ship's wheel and flower sketch with lettering

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a circular tattoo design. A ship's wheel frames a small sailing ship on the sea, with a flower at the base and the words DARLIN IM NOT arched across the top and COMIN HOME along the bottom. The linework is in grey pencil with light shading on the wheel spokes and the water, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Traditional Lettering Ship's wheel Ship Sea Flower Lettering Text

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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

Right, pull your chair in, the stove's only just caught. You want the one about Nell Harrigan and the boat that didn't come in? Everybody on this quay knows it, though nobody tells it right. Her man, Tom Greaves, shipped out on the Mary Ellis in the autumn, a little three-masted thing with a wheel that had been painted blue so many times the spokes had gone soft as butter.

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Each Friday Nell walked down past the lamp posts to the wall at the end of Dock Street and read the chalked board where the harbour clerk wrote the arrivals. Every Friday the same answer. Still out. Still out. She took to sitting on a bollard with a flask of tea gone cold and a pencil stub, drawing that ship on the back of her shopping list, because she said if she could get the wheel right she could steer it home herself.

Then one February night the wind came round from the north and a note came under her door, pushed through by a boy who wouldn't stop to be thanked. It was in Tom's handwriting, blurred with seawater, and it said only darlin, I'm not coming home, so don't you wait up for me. She read it twice, folded it into the wheel she'd drawn, pressed a flower in beside the keel, and buttoned the lot inside her coat.

The Mary Ellis came in on the morning tide with her wheel still turning and a crew of six, and Tom wasn't one of them. Nell never went back to the wall. The flower, she told me, was for the stranger who'd written the note for him, the only soul aboard who'd thought to put pen to paper at all. Mind your cup now, that stove's hotter than it looks.