Fine line black tattoo of a small sailboat on waves on the inner wrist, with a nautical chart behind the raised hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small sailboat on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small sailboat sits on a line of waves on the inner wrist of a raised hand. The linework is fine and the ink is solid black with no shading. The pale skin contrasts with a blue and cream nautical chart in the background, which fills most of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Sailboat Wave Sea Boat

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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

You had the chart spread across the back kitchen table because the parlour was too damp for paper, and Mrs Pelham from the chandlery had already asked twice whether you meant to ruin the lino. Soundings in fathoms, pencilled in your father's neat hand, ran out past the Widow's Teeth into water nobody in Porthgarrow had ever troubled to name. So you named it. You wrote EAGLE across the blue in capitals, because the gull that had nested on your roof all spring was the only thing that ever came back when you called.

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The Marguerite had gone out on the Tuesday tide with Tom Ferris at the tiller and her mainsail patched in three colours. By Thursday she had not come home. You sat with the dividers and a stub of pencil and worked out where a boat with a dead engine would drift if the wind held westerly. The answers came out in tidy arcs across the soundings, and you did not like any of them.

On Friday morning she was tied up at the slip after all. Tom was asleep in the bottom boards with a bottle he had not finished, and he said the wind had gone round just as he went to bail, and that he had never once in his life been so cold. You did not tell him about the arcs. You took the pen from the jar and drew a small sailboat on the chart, sitting on a line of waves exactly where he had come in, and you inked it over twice so it would not fade.

It is small enough now to cover with a thumb. Your father would have laughed at a symbol that size on a working chart, but he never saw how the sea went flat in the lee of the Teeth, and he never had to find a boat by the shape of her drift. The gull still comes to the roof. You still answer it.