Clipper Ship Tattoo Meaning

Adventure, journey, freedom, and full sails toward the unknown.

The Cutty Sark was built to beat the Thermopylae, and it nearly did.

In the era of the tea clippers — the 1860s–1870s, before the Suez Canal made steamships definitively faster — the race from China to London was the most watched sporting event in the British world. The ship that arrived first with the new season's tea commanded the highest prices and the most prestige. The Cutty Sark was designed by Hercules Linton in 1869 specifically to beat the Thermopylae, the fastest clipper then sailing. On her first voyage, a rudder failure cost her the race. She never definitively beat the Thermopylae, though she came within hours on multiple voyages.

The golden age of sail lasted approximately forty years — from the development of the extreme clipper hull in the 1840s to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the subsequent dominance of steam. The clipper ships were the fastest things that had ever crossed oceans under human power, and they were obsolete within a generation of their perfection.

The name Cutty Sark comes from Robert Burns's poem Tam o'Shanter — the short shirt worn by the witch Nannie, who chased Tam's horse across the bridge at Alloway. The ship's figurehead is Nannie in her cutty sark, her arm outstretched reaching for the tail of Tam's mare. The fastest ship of its era named for a witch who almost caught something she could not quite reach.

The clipper ship tattoo is the image of the thing built entirely for speed, for the race that required everything to be sacrificed to movement — comfort, cargo capacity, longevity. The shape of something that was made to go as fast as possible through the most difficult water in the world, and knew it.

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