Colour tattoo on an upper arm showing a sunflower, a pocket watch and a compass, with watercolour splashes in teal, orange and red.

Sunflower, pocket watch and compass on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Two side-by-side photographs of a colour tattoo on the upper arm, showing a yellow sunflower with a textured dark centre above a pocket watch with Roman numerals and a banner reading 1989. A compass with a red and black N, dark sketchy linework and loose watercolour splashes in teal, orange and red fill the background. The bold colour and splatter contrast with the fine black outlines, and the arm rests against striped fabric.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had belonged to the ship since the day she was launched at Hull in 1989, and it ran eleven minutes fast on every voyage, so the cook said it had opinions of its own about the sea. Nobody aboard the Mary Ellen would touch its works. The boy, Caleb Prowse, carried it in his waistcoat and wound it each morning at the bell, because the old mate had told him a ship that forgot the hour would forget its way.

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Off the coast of Portugal they put in at a harbour where a woman sold seed from a barrow. Caleb bought a paper twist of sunflower seed for a penny and sowed it in a tin bucket lashed to the taffrail. Within a fortnight it stood a hand taller than the bucket and turned its face to the sun as the ship swung round, more faithfully than any needle. The compass had lost its nerve in the calms off the Azores, its red and black N wandering like a drunk man looking for his door.

In the squall that took the topgallant, the lamp blew out and the compass card spun. The watch stopped at a quarter past four and would not start again. Caleb went to the rail, where the flower had bent hard to the west under the gale, its great dark face streaming. The captain laughed until he saw where the boy was pointing, and then he laughed no more. They put the helm over and steered by the flower until the cloud broke.

When they came home to Hull the watch was still stopped. Caleb dropped it off the quay on purpose, because it had never once told the truth. He kept the seeds. Every summer after, he planted a row along the quay wall, and every summer the heads of the dockers turned west, as though somebody were coming home.

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