Traditional style tattoos of ships, roses and a sailor portrait on a woman's stomach and upper thigh, with her face cropped out of frame.

Ships, roses and a sailor on torso and thigh

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A woman wears a black and white bow top and black briefs, showing traditional tattoos of two ships and red roses across her stomach and hips. A bearded sailor portrait with the word CAPTAIN and a rose design with a head sit on her thigh. Bold outlines and solid fills dominate, with red, pink and blue ink giving the piece a mixed palette against a lightly furnished room.

Traditional Other Thigh Ship Rose Sailor Portrait Lettering 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

Mind the third step, it gives under a man's weight, and you've got the weight of a tea urn on you. There. Sit by the stove and I'll tell you how the Greyling Light came to be kept burning, because my grandmother swore it was the only true story on this coast and she never once told it sober.

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Her man was called Tobias Crane, a stout fellow with a beard like a hedge and a ship's name spelled out across his knuckles, the Marigold, though he'd never sailed her, only kept her picture in his coat. Every tide he walked the cliff path to wind the clockwork, and every tide he came back with a red rose tucked in his buttonhole, pinched from the hedge below the chapel, bright as a slapped cheek.

The trouble came in February. The Kestrel went onto Tallow Reef in fog, and the lamp had been left to gutter for an hour while the keeper mended a wick. Tobias never blamed him, and that was the worst of it. He took the brass anchor off his own mantelpiece, rowed it out past the breakwater, and let it go, saying the sea owed him nothing and he owed the sea less.

The spring after, the roses came up red along the cliff edge where no one had planted them. The keeper cut his name into the lintel above the lamp room door, and beneath it he carved one word, CAPTAIN, so that every man coming up the path would know who was minding the light now. Mind the step on your way out, mind it well.