Back view of a man in a white t-shirt showing a black traditional-style ship's wheel with a skull at its centre on his forearm, and a partly visible coloured tattoo on his upper arm.

Ship's wheel with skull on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A man seen from behind wears a white t-shirt with the sleeve rolled up, showing a black ink ship's wheel with a skull at its centre on the forearm, with spokes and small details drawn in bold linework. Above it, only part of a second tattoo is visible on the upper arm, with blue and red tones. The background is a dark car and street, and the lighting is soft and even.

Traditional Forearm Upper arm Ship's wheel Skull Wheel Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the kettle back on, Ada, and don't look at me like that. I've told this one a hundred times and the wheel has never once changed its spokes. The Margery Dunn went onto the Sallow Bar in the fog of March, the year the lifeboat house burned, and her steering wheel came ashore in one piece with a skull still grinning from the hub. Old Tom Carrow swore it was the same skull he'd seen painted on the bulkhead of his father's smack, and that a man who steers by a grinning thing had better keep his jokes to himself.

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They found Tom two days after, sitting on the shingle with his boots full of sand and the bell rope wrapped twice around his wrist. He would not let anyone take the wheel off him. Dr Pennock said it was the cold talking. Mrs Halsey said it was the rum. But when the men carried the wheel up the cliff path to the boarding house, Tom walked behind it all the way with his hand flat on a spoke, as if the ship might still need steering.

The wheel hangs over the stair in Halsey's hall now. Every time the front door sticks and lets in the wind, the wheel turns a little on its nail, and the skull comes round to face whoever is coming in. Tom is buried at Sallow Head where the fog bell used to ring. Mind the third stair on your way up, lodger. The sea is still in the hinges, and it likes to know who has come home.