Noah's Ark Skateboard Wall Art: Two Biblical Decks at Dusk

Noah’s Ark skateboard wall art is a single 85 × 20 cm (33.5 × 7.9 in) deck from my Biblical Series in the Sacred collection, printed with Noah guiding the animals aboard the ark under a rainbow in a flat, stained-glass style. The deck is Grade-A 7-ply Canadian maple with a gallery-quality UV print, made to hang on a wall rather than to ride, and it ships from Berlin with hardware sold separately.

By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin

The Biblical Series lives in the Sacred collection: ten stories, ten decks, one visual language of black outlines, flat colour and gold halos. This page is about two of them, and about one evening. The Crucifixion already has its own close reading in The Crucifixion: Stained Glass, the Skull of Adam. Here it is the second board. The first is Noah.

Two Decks Among the Boulders

No wall, no studio sweep. Boulders covered in pale lichen, dry grass to the knee, distant hills, and a sky going from deep blue to a thin orange line. The decks were lit with artificial light, so the print stays bright while the land around it goes dark. That is the point of the photographs: they show how much the colour carries when nothing else in the frame does.

The cover is Noah upright between two stones, sunset behind. Below, the decks take turns. Each photograph holds one deck; the two never share a frame.

What the Noah’s Ark Deck Shows

The product page puts it in one line: Noah guiding every creature aboard, in the bold flat colour of cathedral stained glass. Read the board from nose to tail and the story stacks vertically, which is what a deck is good at.

• Nose: a rainbow in red, orange and yellow bands over a blue sky with white clouds.
• Upper half: the wooden hull of the ark, planks drawn in dark outline, with two giraffes looking out of the opening.
• Centre: Noah, white-bearded, gold halo, white robe under a red mantle, a staff in one hand. His other hand reaches toward the animals: an elephant, a pair of zebras.
• Lower half: a lion, two sheep, and two white doves at the waterline.
• Tail: curling blue and white waves.

The board compresses the story into one climb: animals boarding above, flood below, and the rainbow, which in Genesis comes last, at the nose. The maple edge stays visible around the print, so even in a field at dusk it reads as a skateboard deck and not a church panel.

Against the dark rock the red mantle and the yellow giraffes carry furthest. The blue waves nearly match the evening sky; the white crests keep the tail from dissolving. Worth knowing if you plan a navy wall.

The Story on the Board: Genesis 6–9

The product description sends you to Genesis 6–9, and it is worth reading the chapters themselves rather than the picture-book version. I used the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition on Bible Gateway.

• The ark. Genesis 6:14–16 gives the instructions: cypress wood, pitch inside and out, a door in the side, three decks, and dimensions of 300 by 50 by 30 cubits. The board shows the hull and the opening, not the measurements.
• Two of every kind. Genesis 6:19–20 asks for two of every kind, male and female. Genesis 7:2–3 then adds seven pairs of the clean animals and of the birds. The deck follows the familiar version: pairs.
• The birds. In Genesis 8:6–12 Noah sends out a raven, then a dove three times. The second time it comes back in the evening with a freshly plucked olive leaf. The two white birds at the waterline are the deck’s nod to that.
• The landing. Genesis 8:4 sets the ark on “the mountains of Ararat.” The product page says Mount Ararat. The text has the plural.
• The rainbow. Genesis 9:12–17 makes the bow in the clouds the sign of the covenant with “every living creature,” never again a flood to destroy the earth.

Genesis does not name giraffes, zebras, elephants or lions. Those are the artist’s choice, and the long necks suit a tall, narrow board. The halo is not in the text either. Genesis 6:9 calls Noah “a righteous man, blameless in his generation”; the halo is how the stained-glass style says that.

The product page notes that the story is recognised across Judaism, Christianity and Islam. That reach is part of why Noah works for people who would not hang a Crucifixion.

Noah’s Ark in Art History: From Catacombs to the Sistine Chapel

Told in one breath, Genesis 6–9 is simple enough to paint: a flood sent to wipe out a violent world, one righteous man told to build an ark, the animals going in two by two, rain for forty days and forty nights, a dove that comes back with an olive leaf, and a rainbow set in the clouds as God’s promise never to flood the earth again. Every one of those moments has its own long history in art, and most painters chose just one or two.

The earliest Christian painters kept it to a single frame. In the Roman catacombs, the Catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter among them, Noah appears as a figure standing in a small box-like ark, the dove flying toward him. It was one of the rescue stories the catacomb painters returned to again and again, alongside Daniel in the lions’ den and the three young men in the furnace (Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology). Medieval artists told it as a sequence. The Crusader Bible, made in Paris around 1244–1254 and now in the Morgan Library & Museum, packs the whole story onto one page: God’s command, Noah at his carpenter’s bench, the family and animals inside the ark as the dove returns, then everyone leaving the ark and Noah’s sacrifice (Morgan Library, MS M.638, fol. 2v). In Venice, the thirteenth-century mosaics in the atrium of St Mark’s Basilica tell the same chapters in mosaic, from the animals boarding to the family stepping out under the rainbow.

The best-known version leaves the ark almost out of the picture. On the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted between 1508 and 1512, Michelangelo gave Noah three of the nine Genesis panels: the Sacrifice of Noah, The Flood (often called The Deluge) and the Drunkenness of Noah. In The Flood, crowds carry what they can up a last hill and a small boat is about to go under, while the ark waits in the background (Vatican Museums). Three centuries later the American Quaker painter Edward Hicks went the other way. His Noah’s Ark of 1846, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is all animals, a long patient line of lions, zebras, giraffes and more walking toward the ark, based on an 1844 lithograph by Nathaniel Currier (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

My deck sits closer to Hicks and the medieval pages than to Michelangelo. There is no drowning crowd on it. It keeps what people remember: the ark, the animals in pairs, the white birds, the waves and the rainbow, drawn in the flat colour and black outline of a church window and stacked from nose to tail.

The Crucifixion, Briefly

The second deck in the shoot draws, in the product page’s words, on the icon tradition: deep cathedral blue, Mary and John at the foot of the cross, a skull in the earth beneath. Christ on the cross at the nose, a white loincloth, a gold halo, clouds behind. Mary on the viewer’s left in blue and red, hands together. John on the right in white and red. The cross stands on a heap of drawn rocks with the skull among them.

John’s Gospel supplies both details. John 19:17 names the site “the Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha.” John 19:25–27 puts Jesus’s mother by the cross with “the disciple whom he loved,” the disciple tradition identifies as John (John 19, NRSVUE). Why artists put an actual skull there, and how the black outlines echo lead lines in church windows, is the subject of the Crucifixion stained-glass article. I will not repeat it here.

Why These Two Hang Well Together

Not sold as a pair, they still work as one, for three reasons.

The same hand. Both boards use the same black outline, the same gold halos, the same red and blue robes, the same flat sky with puffed white clouds. Side by side they read as two windows from one church, not two posters.

The same blue. Noah’s waves and the Crucifixion’s sky share a deep cathedral blue. Together, that colour runs across both: water at the bottom of one, sky at the top of the other.

The text links them. The New Testament itself reads the flood forward. 1 Peter 3:20–21 recalls the ark, “in which a few, that is, eight lives, were saved through water,” and says that baptism is what this prefigured (1 Peter 3:18–22, NRSVUE). One board ends in a rainbow, the other in a skull among stones. Old Testament on one, New Testament on the other.

Noah alone is the gentler choice: animals, colour, a promise. The Crucifixion alone is the heavier one. Together the wall tells a beginning and a turning point. If you want a third, the Resurrection deck from the same series is the obvious next board.

Size, and How to Hang the Pair

Both product pages list the same specification:

• Size: 85 × 20 cm (33.5 × 7.9 in), one vertical deck each.
• Material: Grade-A 7-ply Canadian maple, the wood used in professional skate decks.
• Print: gallery-quality UV print, no glass needed.
• Mounting: the product page lists pre-drilled holes for wall mounting and calls the piece decorative wall art.
• Hardware: not part of the deck listing. Mounts are sold separately in display accessories.
• Ships from Berlin, worldwide, in protective packaging.

Two singles side by side

• Gap: about 10–15 cm. How many decks on one wall gives that range for two separate decks hung as a pair. Two 20 cm boards plus that gap make the pair 50–55 cm wide and 85 cm tall.
• Order: my suggestion is Noah on the left and the Crucifixion on the right, so the wall reads in Bible order. Nothing on the product pages requires it.
• Height: on an open wall, centre the pair about 145–150 cm from the floor. The tops land near 190 cm.
• Above furniture: leave about 15–25 cm between the top of the sideboard, bench or headboard and the tails of the decks. At 50–55 cm the pair suits a console, a narrow chest or a hallway pier, not the full width of a sofa.
• Tops level, gaps exact. Same guide: uneven spacing reads as amateur faster than the wrong artwork.

Fix each deck into a stud or a proper anchor. Steps are in How to Hang Skateboard Wall Art. The wall mount is the wall option. The floor stand is the one if you want a deck leaning or standing, the way they stood in the grass.

Where the pair sits well

A hallway, a landing, a study, a reading corner. Dense colour suits warm wood and darker walls better than stark white; the photographs show a dark backdrop pushing the reds and golds forward. For three or more decks from the series in a row, my guide to how many skateboard decks fit on one wall gives 8–12 cm between singles, and the gallery-wall guide covers longer runs.

The Rest of the Series

The Sacred collection lists ten Biblical Series decks: The Resurrection, Noah’s Ark, The Crucifixion, David and Goliath, The Last Supper, Saint George and the Dragon, Samson and the Lion, Daniel in the Lions’ Den, Jonah and the Whale, and Moses Parts the Red Sea. All are singles at 85 × 20 cm in the same style.

• Stay with water: Jonah and the Whale or Moses Parts the Red Sea continue Noah’s waves.
• Stay with the Passion: The Last Supper (Biblical Series) before the Crucifixion, the Resurrection after.
• Not the same deck: the Leonardo Last Supper is a Renaissance painting on maple, not a stained-glass retelling. It has its own shoot in Last Supper Skateboard Wall Art in a Retro Diner.

Byzantine icons, Raphael, El Greco and the wider sacred range are in Sacred Art and Icons on Skateboard Decks.

FAQ

Are Noah’s Ark and The Crucifixion sold as a set?

No. They are two separate singles, each with its own listing, both in the Sacred collection. On 6 October 2026 there was no set product combining them. Buy both and hang them as a pair with a 10–15 cm gap.

What size is the Noah’s Ark deck?

85 × 20 cm (33.5 × 7.9 in), one vertical deck of Grade-A 7-ply Canadian maple. The Crucifixion is the same size. Side by side with a 10–15 cm gap, the pair is about 50–55 cm wide.

Does the deck follow the Genesis story?

In outline, yes: the ark, animals in pairs, the doves, the flood waters and the rainbow of Genesis 9. Genesis does not name giraffes, zebras, elephants or lions; those are the artist’s picks for a tall board.

Is it suitable for a child’s room?

The subject is gentle: animals, a rainbow, no violence on the board. It is still an 85 cm maple deck, so fix it into a stud or a proper anchor, out of reach of a cot or bunk. The nursery and kids’ room guide covers placement.

Is hardware included, and can I ride it?

Hardware is separate: the wall mount and the floor stand are their own products. The product page describes the deck as decorative wall art with pre-drilled holes for mounting. No trucks or wheels.

Which way round should I hang the two decks?

Noses up. I hang Noah on the left and the Crucifixion on the right so they read in Bible order, but either works. Keep the tops level, the gap at 10–15 cm, and the centre around 145–150 cm on an open wall, as in how many decks on one wall.