The pinisi is the two-masted trading schooner of South Sulawesi — seven or eight sails on a gaff-ketch rig with permanently standing booms, three jibs off a triangular bowsprit. This system takes its ground from the sail: sun-bleached cotton canvas, a faint-warm white, the same field as a working hull's white-painted topsides.

Against that white the hull carries hard painted livery: a vermilion boot-topping, a chrome-yellow strake, cobalt topsides, bare oiled plank below. Every band follows one sheer curve and stops at a hard edge. Nothing here is airbrushed, and nothing is rounded.