Pirates make great subjects for fancy dress parties and are suitable for young and old alike.
The outfits are very versatile as you can improvise by cutting up old clothes to make them look ragged, or you can buy custom made pirate fancy dress.
Many accessories are available, such as fake moustaches, beards, eye patches and cutlasses.
Pirate outfits were a popular choice for fancy dress costume parties long before Johnny Depp made the pirate look a sexy one.
Whilst the swash-buckling Captain Jack Sparrow look-alike is an obvious choice and will always go down well, there are other pirate outfits you can choose from.
For example, you could dress as Captain Hook, the villainous pirate chief and captain of the Jolly Roger in J.
M Barrie's Peter Pan.
Hook is now a traditional pantomime character, whom we all love to hate and boo and hiss at.
Captain Hook is a great character for pirate fancy dress.
He wears a long red coat, Buccaneer boots, black breeches, a white frilly shirt and a black "Tricorn" hat with a white feather.
You will also need a long black curly wig and a fake hook hand.
In the story of Peter Pan, Captain Hook's hand was bitten off by a crocodile.
The crocodile liked the taste of Hook so much, that its aim is to eat the rest of him! As the crocodile also swallowed a loudly ticking clock, Hook always knows when the crocodile is near.
Another great pirate fancy dress costume is Long John Silver.
He is the villain of the book Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and is most like what we think of as a traditional pirate.
Long John Silver is perhaps most famous for two things - his wooden leg and his parrot.
He is obsessed with looking for the treasure that his former comrade Billy Bones hid.
Now it might be a bit difficult to imitate a wooden leg, but a crutch would do and you can buy toy parrots of various types.
If you want to dress as a real pirate from history, then the most notorious and feared of them all is the legendary Blackbeard.
He was the original pirate of the Caribbean and is the subject of many films and books.
Apparently, his appearance was so terrifying that his enemies often surrendered just at the sight of him.
To look as terrifying as Blackbeard, you will need a long, bushy black beard.
It is said that Blackbeard used to separate his beard into tails, tying each with a different colour ribbon, so this is something you could do for authenticity to enhance your own pirate outfit.
It is also said that Blackbeard carried a sling across his chest which contained three pairs of pistols and that he carried a cutlass and several knives in his belt.
Fortunately, there are plenty of fake cutlasses, pistols and other accessories you can buy to enhance your pirate fancy dress costume.