Upper arm sleeve tattoo in black and grey shading with a ship wheel, waves and a banner reading of the Sea, with pink flowers and a compass star.

Ship wheel sleeve with banner and flowers

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman in a grey vest top shows a full arm sleeve on her upper arm, seen against a grey sea and a stone wall. The design centres on a shaded ship's wheel with a scroll banner above it reading of the Sea, surrounded by swirling waves and clouds. Pink five-petalled flowers and a small compass star add the only colour against the black and grey shading.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Shoulder Ship wheel Banner Lettering Wave Flower Compass Sea Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wheel came up the shingle at low water, bumping over the weed like a sledge, and Dennis Varley would not let the boy from the harbour office take the other end. He had carried it off the Queen of the Sea the winter she broke her back on the Carrow reef, and he had kept it dry under his stairs for forty years, which his wife never once forgave.

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Ada Pell from the lifeboat station wanted it for the new museum case. It's a wheel, Dennis, not a relic, she said. He told her a wheel that had brought a crew home twice and failed them the third time was a relic whether anyone liked it or not. She asked what had happened the third time. He wiped the salt off the brass hub with his cuff and said the boat had been running for the cove under a sky much like this one, grey and wide, and the mate had shouted for the helm. Dennis had been the one holding it. He said no more, and Ada, who had buried her own husband off that same reef, did not push.

That April frost split the yard wall, and a line of pink thrift pushed up through the mortar, the same five-petalled pink his daughter had asked him to paint on the stern for her name day. He bolted the wheel to the outside of the wall, facing the water, and left the flowers where they grew. On windy mornings the spokes turn on their own, slow and stubborn, and nobody in Scarrow has yet asked which way they are pointing.