Small black fine line sailboat on waves tattooed on the inner wrist, with the hand raised in front of a nautical chart.

Small sailboat tattoo on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand shows a tiny sailboat with a single sail above a few wave lines, tattooed on the inner wrist. The tattoo is drawn in thin black linework with no shading, and it is sharp against the pale skin. The background is a nautical chart in blue and cream, which sits behind the hand and gives the photo a maritime theme.

Fine line Forearm 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

The chart came in a tea chest with the rest of my uncle's things, rolled tight and tied with garden twine. I unrolled it across the counter of the chandlery at Halden Quay and weighted the corners with a sextant, two mugs and a tin of pear drops. Soundings in fathoms, a reef picked out with a small cross, and the Eaglet Bank running off the edge as though somebody had stopped writing mid-word.

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Uncle Cyril had sailed a single-sailed dinghy called Mab out of this harbour for forty years and never once let anyone else take the tiller. He used to say a boat with one sail was honest, because there was nowhere to hide a second opinion. In the bottom margin, beside a date from the previous October, someone had drawn a tiny sail above three wavy lines, pencilled so lightly I had to tilt the paper to the window to see it.

That was the day he went out alone and came back at dusk with the sail torn and no fish. The family story was that he had lost his nerve. Now I wondered whether he had been checking the bank, and whether the cross on the chart marked something he never explained.

So on the next flat calm I took Mab out myself. The water was the colour of weak tea over sand, and the Eaglet Bank rose under the hull exactly where the pencil line said it would. A grey buoy knocked against the bow with a bottle lashed to it, and inside was a note in his cramped capitals: TIDE TURNS, GO HOME, MAB KNOWS THE WAY. I sailed back with the wind on my cheek and did not look at the chart again. At the shop I took the pencil from behind my ear and drew a second sail beside his, so that anyone who unrolled the chart next would see two boats heading in.