Black line drawing of a ship's wheel, lily and hibiscus-style flowers, and a rope and anchor in a neo-traditional sketch style, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ship's wheel, flowers and anchor design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a ship's wheel at the top, with several large flowers below it, including a lily-like bloom on the left and a hibiscus-style bloom at the bottom. A coiled rope wraps around the wheel and flowers, ending in a small anchor at the lower right. The work uses bold black outlines with light shading on the petals and spokes, on a plain pale background.

Botanical Neo-trad Ship's wheel Lily Hibiscus Flower Rope 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

Pass the kettle, love, and mind the wheel in the hall, it's heavier than it looks. Tom brought that off the Ardent the week they broke her up for scrap, and he hung it where the coats go, because a man who has steered ships for thirty years does not like to be without a way of turning things.

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The flowers came later, every one from a port he never let me forget. The lily came from Funchal in a paper twist, a dry brown bulb the neighbours swore would never take in our wet northern yard. The hibiscus was a cutting pushed into a jam jar on the Ardent's foredeck off Kingston, and it rode the tides with him for three voyages before I got it into the back bed. Whenever he came off a boat, the rope he'd coiled over his shoulder went onto the gate hook, and it stayed there until he sailed again.

The winter of the big gale, the Ardent was due in on the Tuesday and didn't come. I sat in the kitchen with the wheel's shadow across the floor and counted the knots in that rope the way you count beads, sure that if I reached the end the sea would give him back. On the Thursday a fisherman's boy came up the hill with a note in a sealed bag. Tom had been pulled off a skerry, half frozen, and the first thing he'd asked for was the lily bulb he'd tucked in his coat for me.

The lily's still against the wall. Nobody digs it out, and every June it opens white and loud, the way he was. See there, on the gatepost, the little anchor he scratched with a nail the morning he came home, so I'd always know which way to come in.