Ship Tattoo Ideas: Sailing, Pirate and Viking

What a ship tattoo means

On a sailor the ship was a record before it was a symbol. Lore ties particular voyages to particular marks, and the fully rigged ship, three masts or more with square sails on all of them, is said to have belonged to men who had sailed round Cape Horn, where the Southern Ocean squeezes through the Drake Passage. How strictly that was ever kept is unknown, since the evidence is mostly memoir and flash-sheet captions, but the idea of a tattoo earned by a passage rather than bought on a whim is real, and it is what the older ships on this page carry.

Away from the log, a ship is a journey and the person who makes it. Under full sail it is departure and ambition, a life steered by its owner; in a storm it is a hard passage endured; heading home it is return. A shipwreck is the bleak inversion, the voyage that ended, worn as a memorial or as a reminder of what was survived. The ship in a bottle, built with its masts hinged flat and raised by a thread once inside, is the patient version: a whole voyage made small, and kept rather than sailed.

A pirate ship is a sailing ship plus a black flag, and the flag holds all the meaning. The skull-and-crossbones Jolly Roger belongs to the early eighteenth century, when pirates of Blackbeard's generation flew black flags so that merchant ships would surrender without a fight; worn now it means freedom from rules rather than theft.

The longship, the commonest vessel here, belongs to the Norse and means something else again: a crew rather than one sailor, raiding, trading and settling as far as Newfoundland, and in death a ship to carry the dead into the burial mound, which is how the best-preserved ones survived.

Where the design comes from

The Gokstad and Oseberg ships, dug from Norwegian burial mounds in 1880 and 1904, supply much of what is known of longships, and Gokstad's sixty-four shields explain the row in nearly every drawing. The sailing ships come from the tattoo shop: port tattooers around 1900 sold flash crowded with clippers, and in mid-century Honolulu Norman Collins, Sailor Jerry, fixed the ships, swallows and nautical stars of the traditional style. The flash sheet here comes straight from it.

Choosing yours

• Choose the ship by what it carries. A square-rigger means the sea as a working life, with the Cape Horn lore attached; a longship with shields and a dragon prow means the Norse; a pirate ship needs its flag. Five longships and a carved prow make the Norse vessel the best represented here.
• Rigging is the design problem: below about 12 cm every stay and shroud closes up against the next and the sails turn grey, so detail goes first. To keep a small ship legible, go bigger, cut the rigging to a few bold strokes as flash does, or pick a longship, which loses little when the design shrinks.

Common questions