Full arm sleeve tattoo in black and grey shading with pink flowers, showing a ship wheel, waves and a 'of the Sea' banner on the upper arm and forearm.

Ship wheel sleeve with waves and script

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full sleeve covers the upper arm and forearm of a person standing by water. It combines a ship's wheel, rolling waves, a scroll banner reading 'of the Sea', a small compass star and two pink flowers. The shading is mostly black and grey with soft tonal blending, and the pink flowers provide the only colour.

Neo-trad Realism Upper arm Forearm Ship wheel Wave Script Banner Flower Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Haskell dragged the wheel up the slipway by its one good spoke, the gulls shrieking at her as if she had stolen their dinner. Eli said it was no use to anyone, that the Mary Tenner had gone down off Trevose with every man aboard and the sea had kept what it wanted. Nan said the sea had sent back the wheel, and a wheel was a thing you could hang on a wall.

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She counted the spokes that night by the stove, eight of them, each one blistered with salt and worn pale where a hundred pairs of hands had gripped it. Someone had scratched a small star on the hub, four points, like the compass rose on the chart in the church hall. Round the rim ran a carved wave, cut so many times that it had become a second rim of its own. She rubbed it with linseed until the grain showed through like a bruise going yellow.

On the third morning there were two pink thrift flowers wedged between the spokes, fresh as if picked from the cliff that hour. Eli swore he had not put them there. Nan did not argue. She took a tin of white paint down to the boathouse and wrote OF THE SEA across the planks in letters a foot high, leaving a gap before the words where a name might one day go, and hung the wheel above the door so the wind could turn it.