Pirate Coloring Pages
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Pirate pages give a child something most subjects do not: a story with a map in it. Buried treasure, a ship, an island and a crew are a complete narrative kit, and children will happily invent the rest. These 15 pirate coloring pages cover captains, ships, treasure hunts and sea battles. Every design downloads as a free printable PDF sized for US Letter paper, 8.5 by 11 inches.
What Is in the Collection
Characters are the friendliest entry point. Pirate Captain With a Parrot on His Shoulder, Female Pirate With a Sword and Tricorn Hat, Old Pirate With a Peg Leg and Eye Patch and Young Pirate Cabin Boy With a Lantern.
Ships carry the most linework. Pirate Ship Sailing Under a Skull and Crossbones Flag, Pirate Ship in an Epic Sea Battle, Ghost Pirate Ship in a Storm and Pirate Lookout in the Crow's Nest With a Spyglass.
Treasure and adventure are the pages children request. Pirates Discovering Buried Treasure on an Island, Pirates Mapping Their Treasure Route, Pirates Counting Gold Coins in a Sea Cave and Pirate Adventure.
Three action scenes finish the set: Pirate Walking the Plank, Pirate Swinging From the Ship's Rigging and Pirate Crew Celebrating Around a Campfire on a Beach.
Who These Pages Are For
The simple sheets suit ages 4 to 8, with the captain and the parrot, the pirate ship and the treasure discovery as the easiest. The detailed sheets add full rigging, stormy seas and crowded crews, and suit ages 9 and up.
Teachers use pirate pages for map skills, since the treasure map page leads directly into compass points and grid references, and for narrative writing prompts. Because pirate stories are entirely fictionalized in children's culture, these sheets carry very little of the anxiety that real-world topics sometimes do. See also Ships and Ocean Animals.
Printing and Coloring Tips
Age the map and the sails with one warm color. Lay a light tan or ochre across the paper areas before anything else, and both the treasure map and the canvas sails immediately look weathered rather than new. It is one pencil and it changes the whole page.
Keep the parrot as the only fully saturated thing. A scarlet and blue macaw against a brown, tan and gray pirate reads instantly, which is exactly why parrots ended up in the iconography. Bright everywhere means bright nowhere.
Print on 65 lb cardstock for the ship pages. Rigging is drawn as dozens of fine crossing lines, and heavier stock stops them filling in when a marker crosses them.
More line art in this direction: Ships, Ocean Animals and Knights.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Jolly Roger?
The name for the pirate flag, most famously a white skull above two crossed bones on black. Individual captains flew their own designs rather than one standard flag: Blackbeard's is described as a horned skeleton, and Calico Jack Rackham used a skull over crossed cutlasses. A black flag signaled a demand to surrender, while a red flag traditionally signaled that no quarter would be given.
Did pirates really bury treasure?
Almost never. Pirate crews divided plunder immediately, since most of it was cargo such as cloth, sugar, timber and medicine rather than coin, and it had to be sold quickly. The buried treasure idea rests on one real incident involving Captain William Kidd in 1699 and was then made permanent by Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "Treasure Island" in 1883, which also gave us the treasure map with an X.
Why did pirates wear eye patches?
The romantic answer is injury, and some certainly had one. A more interesting theory, though unproven, is that a patch kept one eye dark-adapted so a sailor could move between bright deck and dark below-decks without waiting for his vision to adjust. Both explanations appear in popular accounts, and the truth is likely that patches were simply common among sailors in a dangerous trade.
Which pirate coloring pages are easiest for young children?
The sheets tagged simple, particularly the captain with a parrot, the pirate ship under the flag and the buried treasure discovery. These use bold outlines and large shapes suited to ages 4 to 7. The sea battle, the ghost ship and the campfire crew scene are crowded with detail and suit ages 9 and up.
Were there female pirates?
Yes. Anne Bonny and Mary Read both sailed with Calico Jack Rackham in the Caribbean and were captured in 1720. Ching Shih commanded a very large pirate fleet in the South China Sea in the early nineteenth century and is often described as one of the most successful pirates in history. The female pirate page is on firm historical ground.