A crab pot is a shape with no decoration in it

The frame of a crab pot, drawn as a wireframe rather than a solid — every rib and net line visible, the far side of the pot showing straight through the near side.

A small tag wired to one corner reads J. R. TREGO.

What is actually printed here?

A crab pot with nothing filled in, so every line holding its shape is visible at once.

Most objects read more like themselves solid — a boat, a bottle, a person all read faster as silhouettes than as line drawings. A crab pot is the opposite case. Filled in, it would just be a box; drawn as a wireframe, with the far ribs showing through the near ones, it becomes the actual mechanism — a volume built to let something in through one opening and stop it finding that opening again.

Why does the funnel matter more than the box around it?

Because the box only has to hold shape. The funnel is what actually catches anything.

A crab pot works by narrowing entry: the netting draws in to a point wide enough for a crab to push through chasing bait, then springs back to something too small and too soft-sided to climb back out of purposefully. None of that shows on a solid drawing of a pot, because a solid drawing hides the inside. Seeing the far wall through the near one is the way to draw a funnel that sits inside a box rather than beside it.

Why draw it as a wireframe instead of showing just the outside?

Because the outside of a crab pot says almost nothing about what it does.

Every rib in the frame holds the netting's shape against the pull of the tide and the weight of whatever's inside it, and there's nothing on a working pot there for any other reason — no handle shaped nicer than it needs to be, no join dressed up. It's the same economy a net-mending needle is built to — nothing added that isn't required to do the job. Drawing every line, near and far, is honest about that: there's no surface to render, because the object doesn't have one it prioritises over its structure.

What makes a good frame print rather than a busy one?

Keeping the far lines readable as behind, not just present.

A wireframe works only if the eye can sort near from far, and at chest size that sorting has to survive with two colours and no shading — usually done by letting the near ribs sit slightly heavier, or letting them break the far lines where they cross, rather than by tone. Miss that and the whole thing collapses into a tangle instead of a volume.

Can I put a real fisherman's or boat's marks on it?

Not somebody else's without their say-so, though the fact that pots get marked at all is free to draw.

A working pot carries its owner's marks because pots get lost, drift, and get hauled up by somebody else's boat, and the tag is how it finds its way home. Real initials, a real boat's registration painted on a buoy, a real skipper's particular knot — those identify one person's actual gear, the same way a real vessel's name is somebody's to license, not to copy. Invented initials carry the idea of ownership without attaching it to anyone in particular, which is why J. R. TREGO is made up.

Does this work for anything other than a crab pot?

Lobster and whelk pots are built on the same idea, narrower or taller depending on what they're built to hold.

The wireframe treatment travels to any trap built around one-way entry, rather than to nets or lines, which catch a different way entirely. For somebody who actually hauls pots, the specific proportions — how deep, how many parlours, how tight the funnel — make it their pot rather than a generic one, the same way the structural view of a splice is specific to how it's actually tied.

Isn't a wireframe too technical-looking for a shirt?

Not if the lines resolve into a recognisable shape from a normal reading distance, which is a drawing problem rather than a wireframe problem.

A good technical drawing reads as an object before it reads as a diagram. The three-quarter angle here is chosen because it's the view where a crab pot's outline stays unmistakable even with nothing filled in, so the technical treatment adds information instead of replacing the shape with one.

Does it print well?

Yes, as line work in one ink against the shirt colour, with nothing filled in to break up.

Olive with cream keeps the whole thing to a single colour beyond the garment, and the near and far ribs want setting at two different line weights rather than two tones — weight survives fabric in a way grey doesn't. The netting between the ribs is the fine element and wants drawing coarser and further apart than a real mesh, the way any dense linework does at this scale.

How do I get one made?

Describe the pot at JustOG — how many parlours, and whether a tag goes on it. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

On a quay somewhere, a pot with no tag on it belongs to nobody until somebody claims it.