Our story
About Drunken Sailor
A small, independent shop of original nautical nonsense: bold, cheerful designs about compasses that can’t find north and sailors who can’t find home.
Why “Drunken Sailor”?
Everyone knows the tune. Most people can sing the first line. Hardly anyone knows the second verse. It is one of those songs that belongs to everybody, and it has a sense of humour built in — which is exactly what we wanted for a shop full of daft seafaring pictures.
So we took the old shanty’s spirit and ran aground with it: compasses that point towards the pub, an anchor that is “holding steady, ish”, a lighthouse with a lean, an octopus with no sea legs, and a ship’s wheel where every hour is rum o’clock.
How the designs are made
Every design is original artwork made for this shop. We don’t use clip art, stock images or anyone else’s characters. The style is deliberately simple: chunky outlines, flat colours and a small palette of ink navy, sailcloth cream, signal red, brass gold and sea teal. That keeps them bold from across a pub and crisp when printed on fabric, ceramic or paper.
Most designs come in two versions — dark lines for pale fabrics and light lines for dark ones — and the badge-style designs carry their own background so they work on any colour. The lettering is set in three typefaces released under the SIL Open Font Licence: Alfa Slab One, Rye and Pacifico.
Meet the Old Salt
Our mascot is an original character of our own: an enormous white beard, a red knitted beanie with a pom-pom, a cable-knit fisherman’s jumper, a rosy nose and a tankard never far from his hand. He sings, he plays the squeezebox, and he is always up for one more verse. He isn’t based on any cartoon or film sailor — we drew him from scratch.
Printed on demand
We don’t keep a stockroom. Our products will be printed and posted by Printful, a print-on-demand company, only after someone orders them. That means less waste, and it lets us offer every design on t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, tote bags, posters and stickers without guessing how many of each to make.
We only sell our own original work. Print-on-demand services, including Printful, don’t allow products that infringe other people’s intellectual property (see Printful’s intellectual property policy), and we wouldn’t want to sell them anyway.
A short history
The shanty behind the name
“Drunken Sailor” is a traditional sea shanty — a work song sung by sailors to keep time during heavy jobs on board. It is listed as number 322 in the Roud Folk Song Index, the catalogue folk-song researchers use to track traditional songs.
According to the song’s Wikipedia article, the first published description of the shanty comes from an account of an 1839 whaling voyage out of New London, Connecticut, to the Pacific Ocean. It was a “stamp and go” or “walk away” shanty: rather than pausing between heaves, the crew marched along the deck with a rope in hand, singing as they went. The tune is in the Dorian mode, which gives it that slightly minor, rolling feel.
It did not stay at sea. By the early 1900s it had become a popular song on land and had been taken up for glee singing at Eton College, and by the 1910s it was being sung regularly at gatherings of the Savage Club in London. It has been widely recorded and performed ever since.
The traditional words are in the public domain. On our designs we use a handful of the best-known lines — “What shall we do with the drunken sailor?”, “Early in the morning”, “Hooray and up she rises” and “Put him in the longboat till he’s sober” — and we leave the rougher verses to the history books.
Source: “Drunken Sailor” on Wikipedia (read September 2026).
Ready to set sail?
Have a look through the designs, or get in touch if there’s something you’d like to see.