Sailors have a quite distinctive appearance, being bare-footed, wide-breeched and braiding their hair into a queue, which is most often tarred. More often than not, they are tattooed.
Sailors are male, and they claim that it is bad luck to have women on a ship - to them the sea is a mother, to women she is a rival..
More often than not, sailors engage in trade, bringing a bag of goods from one port to another.
A good sailor is tidy; A ship has narrow quarters, and clutter soons gets in the way. Furthermore, living on the edge of chaos makes most sailors quite focused on maintaining order.
Most sailors are either extremely focused on keeping their luck, or highly fatalistic. Sailing over the wet abyss, they experience a nigh-constant threat to life unfamiliar to most landlubbers.
Perhaps as a consequence, sailors are quite intent on savouring life to its utmost while they can. Infamous for binge drinking and lechery, sailors also gamble more than other people, eat with zest, and dance with fevour.
Their lecherous ways combined with their superstitions against women on ships have given sailors a reputation for sodomy. To what extent they slake their thirsts on one another is not certain.
Their clean and tidy ways, their love of singing and dancing (and perhaps their reputation for heterodox relationships) make sailors fairly well liked by women.
Pretty much anywhere but in their home port, sailors are transients. An old adage among sailors holds that "when the anchor aweighs, all debts are paid", and most cives of coastal settlements know this. Sailors are considered most unreliable by landlubbers.
On the other hand, crewmates tend to be fairly close, and stand up for one another against outsiders (- and bend over for each other in private, as the landlubbers tend to claim).
Compulsive Behaviour: Rituals or On The Edge.