Fine line black sailboat tattoo with waves on the inner wrist of a raised hand, set against a nautical chart.

Tiny sailboat on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black sailboat with a single sail sits above a few wave lines on the inner wrist of a raised hand. The linework is thin and crisp, with no shading, and the ink appears solid black. The hand and tattoo fill the left and centre of the frame, with a blue and cream nautical chart filling the background.

Fine line Forearm Sailboat Boat Wave Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came to the harbour town of Ardmore every September, and every September the old showman Tobias Crane set up his tent beside the slipway. He kept a shelf of brass-cornered charts he had bought from a drowned purser's widow, and on the shelf sat a wooden sailing boat no longer than a finger, rigged with real linen. For a penny, children could hold it over a tin basin of seawater and say where they wanted it to go.

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One year a girl called Mairi Dunning came to the tent with her penny clenched in her fist. Her father had gone out past the Skerries in a February gale and not come back. She did not want the boat to go anywhere in particular. She wanted it to find him. Tobias told her the boat only went where the chart allowed, and she pointed at the chart on the trestle, at the blue inlet printed EAGLE with its soundings written small along the shore, and said he should look there.

He did not believe in such things, but he unrolled the chart, set the boat on the water and let the draught from the tent flap take its sail. The little hull turned, slow as a clock hand, and drifted towards the inked soundings. Three days later a fishing smack limped into the harbour with a split mast, and her skipper, Angus Dunning, climbed ashore saying he had sheltered in a cove on the chart called Eagle Bay, the only place he had known to run for.

Tobias kept the boat on his shelf after that, its sail still dry, and the chart went back in its tin with the soundings folded inward, where a man could find them again if the weather turned.