I see a tall ship inside a ropy anchor in navy blue on Daddy’s right arm. Outside, he wears only a white tee shirt and factory gray work pants, so I can get a good look of his bare arms with the sleeves rolled up. His skin is fair, freckled like mine, turns pink then red in the scorching, Kentucky summer sun. The ship is dark, dark blue, sailing to the West when I face him. I ask about why and where it came from. It’s fully-rigged with three masts, square sails fully deployed. I don’t understand the words, but I feel the waves. Means the sailor had been around Cape Horn, rough, stormy waters at the southern tip of South America. I didn’t know where on the globe he had been. I fret about pain when he says they used a needle in Singapore. Lots of guys in the Navy did it. He seems shy when I stare. It won’t wash off he warns. I touch it, rub, see if it smears like a fountain pen’s ink on paper. It’s one of those stupid things you do when you’re young and don’t know better I didn’t believe him. I lick my finger and try to erase the mast, the sails, but they won’t budge. “Make it float, Daddy!” He grins, raises his arm, slim but firm from playing softball on weekends for the Velvet Milk company with work buddies. His bicep bulges, relaxes, bulges, and I watch the ship rise and fall, the skin ocean tugging the hull to the right, lifting the bow to the left. I picture Daddy on its tiny deck, racing past the White Cliffs of Dover. He tells me stories about slicing through the Straits of Gibraltar, in love with the Seven Wonders of the World, my 1950’s amalgam of Errol Flynn movies and Popeye. Daddy, the sailor, will never be a fading black and white photo tucked neatly into black triangles glued in his crumbling scrapbook for me, but forever a grinning sixteen-year-old in Navy whites, third of ten children, who lied about his age to join, floating to see the world, his stiff, blond crew cut standing straight up, saluting the wind, his gold-capped tooth glinting promise in the afternoon sun of some mysterious land.