Pencil drawing of a bearded skull wearing a peaked captain's cap with a star and laurel badge, with rope and crossed anchors below, shown as a tattoo design.

Skull in captain's cap with beard and anchor

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a human skull wearing a peaked captain's cap decorated with a star and laurel wreath. A full beard hangs from the jaw, drawn in fine flowing strokes, and a length of rope loops out on either side to meet a pair of crossed anchors at the base. The shading is in soft graphite grey on a cream background, with the design centred on the page.

Skull Beard Rope Anchor Star Laurel Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Mary Ellen wanted Tom Gorse's cap after the sea took him off the Dogger Bank, so I unhooked it from the wheelhouse before his widow could ask for it. It was peaked and salt-stiff, the gold laurel gone the colour of weak tea, with a small star at the front that someone had stitched on by hand. My sister called me soft for keeping it. The crew called me the skipper's ghost, which they meant unkindly, and which I did not mind.

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The rope was the trouble. Tom kept a fathom of old tarred warp coiled beside the anchor locker, and he used to say every knot on a boat was a promise made to the water. In February the glass dropped fast and we ran for Scarborough with the wind coming round the quarter. I was hauling on the sheet when my hands did what they had watched his hands do for twenty years: a bowline, a sheet bend, two turns and a hitch on the cleat. The Ellen came through the squall with her head up. Afterwards Danny, my mate, asked where I'd learnt that. I said I had been paying attention.

At the quay the cap went back on its hook, where it belonged. Tom's widow came down with a tin of shortbread and a question I could not answer, which was whether I meant to keep wearing it. I said I would keep the hook warm for whoever came next. She laughed, then cried, then pressed the coil of old warp into my arms and said, take it, he'd want the knots kept working.

That night I hung the rope beneath the cap, its two loose ends crossing over the peak like the arms of an anchor, and I went down to the bunk with the boat rocking gently under me.