Fine line black tattoo of a small two-masted sailboat on the inner wrist, with a fist raised above it against a wooden surface.

Small sailboat on an inner wrist

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline tattoo of a sailboat with two sails, pennants at the mast tops and a hull with a single waterline, sits on the inner wrist. The linework is thin and even, in black ink with no shading or fill. The photograph shows a clenched fist resting above the wrist on a dark wooden table, with the tattoo shown in sharp focus.

Fine line Hand Sailboat Boat Sail Sea

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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

Every year the Harbour Street school held its reunion in the back room of the Anchor, and every year Mrs Pell asked the same question at the door: who had kept the boat? The boat was a model, a sailing dinghy no longer than a loaf, carved from pine by a boy called Tobias Renn the winter the schoolhouse flooded. He gave it to the class to hold a place for the children who had gone to sea. Nobody remembered which sea.

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The boat went from desk to desk, each child carrying it home for a week in a shoebox lined with flannel. By the third decade it had lost its mast, so a girl named Ada Greave glued on a new one cut from a lolly stick and stitched two pennants from the lining of her mother's old coat. The pennants pointed the wrong way. The class agreed not to mention it.

At the reunion that year the tide was high and the windows rattled in their frames. Ada set the little boat on the trestle table, and the room went quiet. Men who had not spoken since their fathers' funerals came forward one at a time and touched the hull with a single finger, as if counting the planks. Tobias did not come, but his younger brother did, and he said the boat had never been meant to stay on land.

They carried it down to the harbour wall after the speeches. The wind caught the crooked pennants and pulled them flat against the mast, and for a moment the boat seemed to lean into the swell. Nobody reached to take it back. Ada stood with her hands in her pockets and watched it go out over the grey water until it was only a mark on the light.