Free pirate SVG files

Small dark shapes, and nothing loose

Pirate designs are full of small dark things on a pale ground: eye sockets, teeth, gun ports, the marks on a map. Cut from one colour, each of those has to be a hole with nothing loose in the middle of it. So the skull’s patch hangs from two small bridges where its cord is tied, the teeth are slots open at the bottom, and the trail on the map is a row of short separate dashes. Every design lifts off the mat as a single piece.

The ship is the finest of the set. Its masts are about 2.5 mm wide when it is 100 mm long, so cut it at 120 mm or more in card and wood. The silhouette has no inside cuts and sits on a flat keel line, which makes it the one to stand on a painted sea or along the bottom of a party banner.

For parties, bedrooms and treasure hunts

For a birthday, the skull with crossed swords, the hat and the girl pirate skull make invitations, cupcake picks and loot bag labels. The treasure map has no lettering on it, so you can add your own clues, and the monogram frame takes the child’s initial. The parrot, the chest and the island are friendlier shapes for a younger child’s bedroom door. None of them is taken from a film: these are the pirates of old storybooks.

How to open the files

• Cricut Design Space: choose Upload, pick the SVG, and add it to the canvas. Set the width you want; the shape is already welded.
• Silhouette Studio: Designer Edition and above open the SVG. The free Basic Edition does not, so open the DXF instead.
• LightBurn, xTool Creative Space and Glowforge: import the SVG, then set the layer to cut, score or engrave.
• Inkscape, Illustrator and Affinity: open the SVG. It is a plain filled path, so you can recolour it, add a stroke or combine it with your own work.
• Printing or sublimation: use the PNG, which has a transparent background.

Each design page lists the file’s narrowest part at seven sizes, so you can tell whether it will survive at the size you plan to cut.

Questions