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

Tiny sailboat tattoo on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is raised in front of a nautical chart, showing a very small tattoo of a sailboat with a single mast and sail resting on a few wavy lines of water. The linework is thin and black, with no shading, and the design is compact and delicate. The muted cream, blue and grey tones of the chart behind the hand contrast softly with the dark ink.

Fine line Forearm Sailboat Boat Wave Sea Sail Nautical

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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 had been folded so many times that the coast of Skerrowe had split along the crease, and Dad blamed the Admiralty for it rather than himself. He wanted it flat and ready by six, because Mr Pell was coming in on the evening tide to collect it, and Mr Pell did not leave the shop without what he had paid for. I weighted the corners with the brass dividers, a tin of Bovril and the tide tables, and smoothed the paper with the side of my hand until the blue water lay almost level.

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That was when I found the little boat. It was pencilled in the margin off the Kittiwake Rocks, no bigger than my thumbnail: one mast, one sail, and three wavy lines underneath, drawn the way a child draws the sea. Nothing on the printed chart explained it. On the back, in the same soft grey pencil, someone had written Gone round the back of the Kittiwakes. Will wait out the fog. T. Tom Pell had taken the Wren out the previous October and had not come home, and everyone in town had talked about the fog for a month afterwards as though it had been a person.

Mr Pell arrived with his cap in his hands and his face already braced for bad news. I didn't give him any. I turned the chart so he could see the little sail, and he bent over it for so long that the kettle in the back room began to sing. "He always drew her like that," he said at last. "Never could draw a proper hull." He asked if he could keep the note, and Dad, who never gave anything away for nothing, nodded before I had the chance to say no.

Dad pinned the chart up in the shop window that night, folded flat at last, with the Kittiwake Rocks facing the street. Tom's boat sits in the margin still, sail up, pointing out to sea where the fog came down, and nobody in Skerrowe has ever thought to rub it out.