Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.

All about that tattoo

There’s no story behind this tattoo, just a general building up of themes. To me, ships, stars and magic* have most always been intertwined, and this particular piece is good representation of that osculation. Of course there are lots of literary influences, including:

- Tolkien’s Valinor (the Utter West), and “The Road Goes Ever On”,
- the Dawn Treader,
- Hobbs’ Liveships,
- the alethiometer in His Dark Materials, and the gypsies & witches,
- a lot of Robert Frost (“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “Take Something Like a Star”),
- Shakespeare’s “star to every wand’ring bark”,
- Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”,
- Gaiman’s floating pirate ships in Stardust, and likewise the space ships in “Last Exile”,
- further back, the old English folk tales, the ones that warn against falling asleep by a river,
- the numbers three and seven,
- and of course, Kevin Smith’s differentiation between a sailboat and a schooner. (According to Wikipedia, my tattoo is a top sail schooner.)

*I think it helps if you know that I am, at heart, a gigantic fantasy nerd who only doesn’t dress up in garb & prance around renaissance fairs because I can’t be bothered.

—Timoni