Traditional-style winged sailing ship design with a globe and banner, printed in red and grey on the back of a black t-shirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged sailing ship design on a t-shirt

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A printed design of a three-masted sailing ship with white sails sits between two outstretched red and white wings, with a globe and a ribbon banner below. The linework is bold and outlined, with grey shading on the hull, waves and sails and red gradient shading on the feathers. The design is centred on a flat black t-shirt, with the words FINE TATTOO WORK printed in an arc above it.

Traditional Ship Sailing ship Wing Globe Banner Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Halcyon Jane believed the wings would work, least of all Dunstan Reeve, who had paid a Limehouse painter two shillings to daub them across her transom the week before we sailed. We were nine days out of Bristol and the wind had died off the Azores, so the mate said praying was no use and a painted bird was as good as any other.

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The calm held until the third watch on the tenth night. Reeve came up from the hold with his sea chest on one shoulder and a letter buttoned inside his coat, meaning to swim for the lights of Flores if he had to. He stopped at the rail when the sails began to shiver, not from any wind yet but from something moving under the water, and he read aloud the words on the ribbon beneath the globe, which none of us had ever troubled to read. Then the canvas filled with a sound like a door closing somewhere far off, and the whole ship leaned to the north-east as if she had been waiting to be asked.

We made Bristol in a fortnight, faster than any barque out of that port had a right to. Reeve carried his letter up Redcliffe Hill in the rain and knocked on a door with a brass knocker shaped like a fish. A woman in an apron opened it, read the first line, and folded the paper once against her palm without a word.

When he came back down to the quay he had no chest and no coat, only a wet shilling he kept turning over in his fingers. He never said what the letter contained. He only said the ship had got them there on her own, and the painter in Limehouse had been a worse liar than he looked.