Close-up of a small black fine line sailboat tattoo on a person's upper arm, with a hand resting across the forearm.

Small sailboat on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small sailboat sits on a wave line, drawn in thin black lines with a solid dark hull. The boat has a single mast and a flag, and the wavy water lines extend slightly beyond the hull. The photo is a close crop of the upper arm against a plain pale wall, with the tattoo set in the centre of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Sailboat Boat Wave 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

Sit nearer, child, the lamp only warms one face at a time. Now listen. The river Ostrel runs down the middle of two countries, and the line between them is painted on nothing but the buoys, red on one side and white on the other. My grandfather rowed a small boat across it every Thursday for thirty years, carrying eels one way and salt the other, and no guard ever asked his name, because a man who rows slowly is not a man worth stopping.

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The autumn he was late, the fog came down so thick the water disappeared under it. He could not see his own bow. So he steered by the bell on the red buoy and the slap of small waves against the hull, and he kept a square of blue cloth tied to the mast, the one thing his wife had asked him to bring home. She had cut it from her good apron. Nobody on either bank could see it, but he knew it was there, and that was the point of it.

When the fog lifted at dawn he was sitting on the white buoy's chain, surrounded by guards from both sides who had come to argue over him. The eastern captain pointed at the rope in his hand and demanded papers. My grandfather shrugged and said the only paper he carried was the sea's, and the sea had not stamped anything yet. They wrote him down as a boat with no cargo and no name.

He always said it was the best trade he ever made. He came home with nothing but wet boots, a square of blue gone grey, and a clerk's signature that meant nothing at all. Pass me that lamp now. The rest of the story belongs to the tide, and the tide is coming in.