Fine line tattoo of a small sailboat on waves, placed on the inner wrist of a hand raised above a nautical chart.

Small sailboat on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is raised against a nautical chart showing islands, contour lines and coastal detail. A small black sailboat with a single mast and sail sits on a few wavy lines on the inner wrist. The linework is thin and crisp, and the tattoo is set against the pale skin with the blue and cream chart filling the background.

Fine line Forearm Sailboat Boat Wave Sea Sail

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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

Mrs Ada Pennock had drawn the coast of Carrick Sound for forty years and never once trusted a shoal she had not sounded herself, so when the Ellery boy came up the lane claiming the ledge off Fleming Passage had shifted, she put down her pen, took the lead line from its nail and walked down to the slip in the rain.

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The Wren was a twelve-foot cutter the colour of weak tea, with one mast and a sail mended so often it had a patch shaped like Ireland. They ran out past the bell buoy with the ebb pulling hard under the keel. Ada called the depths in the flat voice she kept for chapel and rates: four fathoms, three and a half, then a hiss of wet line through her glove. The boy kept asking whether they would find it. Ada told him the sea never moved a ledge. Men moved stories about ledges, usually for money.

They found nothing but grey water and a seal with opinions. On the run home the boy asked why, if she loved the sea so much, she drew only rocks and never boats. She thought about it while the sail cracked overhead. Rocks stay where you put them, she said. Boats are for people brave enough to be somewhere they haven't marked yet.

That night she unrolled the Carrick Sound chart across the kitchen table, found the Passage, and in the corner margin, where the soundings thinned to nothing, she drew a single mast and a sail no bigger than a fingernail, with three wavy lines beneath it. Then she wrote the date beside it and went up to bed without bothering to rub it out.