Hand-drawn flash design of a tattered American flag hanging from a pole pierced by two arrows, on a plain pinkish-grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattered American flag on a pole with two arrows

Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a torn American flag with red and white stripes and a blue canton of white stars, hanging from a brown pole. A feathered arrow runs through each end of the pole, one with brown fletching and one with white. The flag's lower edge is ragged, and the thick black outlines and flat fills sit on a plain pinkish-grey background with no body part visible.

American flag Flag Arrow Star Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flag went up the mainmast of the Eliza Crane with a hole in its fourth stripe the size of a man's fist, and Captain Orrin Hale would not let us haul it down for the whole of the Horn. He said a flag that had come through the Horn was owed its rags. We lashed the pole to the rail, and the two arrows Dutch Pell had carved from ash went through the ends of it, one with brown fletching from a hen he'd won at cards and one with white gull feathers he'd pulled off the bowsprit net. Pell swore they'd keep the wood from splitting. They did no such thing, but nobody had the heart to say so.

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In the fifty-third degree the wind came round to the south and tore the bottom edge into long teeth, and the blue canton hung in the spray like a wet slate. I spent a night on the foredeck with a palm and needle, sewing what I could and cursing what I couldn't. The boy Tobiah, who was twelve and could not count past the stars on a chart, sat on the windlass and counted them for me in a whisper, over and over, losing his place at thirty-one and starting again. Each time he reached the end he looked up at the holes in the cloth where the light came through from the lantern, and he seemed satisfied that nothing had been lost.

We raised the Chilean coast nineteen days later with the flag still hanging. Captain Hale had it cut down at the dock and folded into a box with the arrows laid beside it, and he gave the box to Tobiah without a word. Last I heard, the boy kept it under a sea chest in Valparaíso and took it out on wet nights to count the stars. He never reached the same number twice, and he said that was the whole point of a flag that had been through the Horn.