Black and grey fine line tattoo of a three-masted sailing ship with rigging on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three-masted ship on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A three-masted sailing ship with furled and unfurled sails and fine rigging lines is drawn in thin, precise black linework. The hull, masts and sails are built up with delicate hatching and light shading, and the ship sits horizontally across the forearm against a plain, softly lit background. The image is entirely black and grey.

Fine line Forearm Ship Sailing ship Rigging Sail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Dennis never once in forty years let a ship go past without giving it the nod, and he'd have you know it was the same ship every time, the Marguerite Ashby, that went down off Padstow in the winter of sixty-one with nobody aboard but a cat and a crate of Madeira. Now you lot will tell me that's a tall tale, and I'll not argue, because the bride's own grandmother asked me the same thing over the trifle and got the same answer. Look at the bloke's arm there, the fine lines of her rigging, every rope in its place. That's Dennis's work, from the shipyard days, when he could rig a model in the time it took the kettle to boil.

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What I'll tell you is this. The night before he sailed for the last time, he sat in the Lamb with his sleeve rolled up and asked the landlady's boy to count the masts. Three, the boy said, and Dennis said no, four, and the boy had to be taught that the mizzen was the mast you forget. They argued till closing. Nobody won. Dennis went off in the morning with a pocket full of pencil stubs and a drawing of her on the back of a tide table.

He came home, mind, which is the part people leave out. He came home to the shipyard and drew her again, and again, until his hand could find the fore-topsail without looking. Then he married a girl from Hayle who said she'd have him only if he stopped drawing ships on the tablecloths. So here's to the pair of them, and here's to the ship that only ever sailed in one direction, which is toward a wedding breakfast. Mind the cat under the table.