Small black fine line sailboat on rough waves on the inner upper arm of a person in a white top.

Small sailboat on waves on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small sailboat with a single mast and a triangular flag sits on a dark hull above wavy water lines. The tattoo is drawn in thin black linework with solid black fill on the hull. The photo shows the tattoo against plain skin with a white vest top and a gold pendant necklace at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Sailboat Boat Wave Sea Flag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Alfie, Dad has finally finished painting the Wren, though he has written the wrong name on her transom twice and scraped it off both times with his thumbnail. She sits on trestles behind the chandlery now, single mast stepped, pennant hanging limp in the damp. Every morning I catch myself checking the sky for wind, as though she might lift off the trestles and go without us.

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Mrs Pell says the harbour master has had his eye on the boat since spring and thinks it too small to be taken past the breakwater. Dad says a boat is only a box of hope until someone sails her out beyond the lighthouse and back, and he has been patient about the sea for thirty years. The fishermen have started calling her the Wren's Egg, which he pretends not to mind. I think he likes it more than he lets on.

On Sunday he took her out alone at first light, before the tide had properly turned. I watched from the wall with the flask. The wind caught her red pennant and she heeled over so far that I shut my eyes, and when I opened them she was already small and steady, riding the little white lines of the swell as if she had been waiting all her life for that exact stretch of water. He came back with salt in his moustache and the flag torn clean at one corner.

He wants you home for the launch in August. Bring your good shoes, because the slipway is greasy, and bring the camera Mum gave you so there is a picture of him looking foolish and happy. I have told him you will come. Tell me you will come.

Love, Nell