Full arm sleeve in traditional style with a sailing ship, shark, swallow, pin-up and roses scattered with small stars, shown in three photographs on the upper arm and forearm.

Traditional nautical full arm sleeve

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve covering the upper arm and forearm, with a sailing ship, a shark, a swallow, a butterfly, roses, a heart banner reading STEWED AND TATTOOED, a pin-up figure, a nautical star and playing cards. The bold black outlines and flat fills in red, green, yellow and black are typical of American traditional work, and small star outlines are scattered across the skin between the motifs. The three panels show the arm from the front, side and back against a plain background.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Ship Shark Swallow Butterfly Rose Heart Pin-up Playing card Star Banner Dagger Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Crouch had sold cod and dabs off the same slab at Portsea market for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had asked about the stars. They were running off the tarpaulin now in thin silver lines, and a boy in a yellow cagoule stopped by the scales to stare. "Did your husband go to all those places?" he asked. "Every one of them," Mabel said, which was half true, and the half that mattered.

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Arthur had come back from the Atlantic run with a ship across his shoulder, a swallow on one wrist, a dagger through a rose on the other, and a dozen small stars he would never explain. He said each star was a hard night he had come through. The swallow was for the one he hadn't. The shark was from Freetown, a bet with a Liverpool stoker who never paid up. Mabel had teased him that the playing cards were for the wages he lost, and he had laughed until he coughed.

"Which one's the worst?" the boy said. Mabel pulled the old ledger from under the counter, the one where Arthur wrote every catch and price in pencil. The last page was blank except for a column of ticks beside dates, and at the bottom he had drawn a banner that read HOMEWARD BOUND, the ink gone soft. She turned it round so the boy could see. "Those are the ones he got home from," she said. "Count them yourself."

The boy counted, moving his lips, and lost his place at nineteen. Mabel took the pencil from behind her ear, made a twentieth tick, then after a moment's thought drew a small star beside it, the way Arthur always had. The rain kept coming. The boy went off with his mother's fish wrapped in newspaper and a question he would carry for years.