Traditional style flash design of a black kraken with yellow eyes wrapping around a sailing ship, with a red sun and banners reading Kraken's Revenge on a starred cream background.

Kraken's Revenge sailing ship design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A black kraken with yellow eyes and red accents coils its tentacles around a three-masted sailing ship on rough waves. A red sun sits behind the ship, and two banners read KRAKEN'S REVENGE above and below the scene, all enclosed in a circular frame. The bold outlines and flat colour fills are set on a cream background scattered with small black stars.

Traditional Octopus Sailing ship Wave Sun Banner Star Tentacle Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Mary Ellen Gorst believed the cook when he swore the kraken had a grudge, but the bosun did, because the bosun had been the one who cut the first arm free off Scilly and laughed about it over rum. Three nights later the sea went flat and oily, and the red sun hung over the stern like a coin nobody wanted to spend.

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I was the boy on the yardarm that night, counting stars because the Bristol men said a sailor who could not name them would fall off the world. There were a great many. The kraken rose beside us without a sound, its yellow eyes as wide as cartwheels, and the first I knew of it was the mainsail tearing like wet paper.

We lost Harkin and the bosun, and the cook's ledger, and a good deal of our pride. The black arms came over the rail one after another, slow and certain, and the carpenter dropped his adze and stared up at them the way a man stares at a debt he had forgotten he owed.

What saved the rest of us was something the cook used to mutter over his pots: that a debt is settled with the one who is owed, and the sea was owed more than any of us. So we heaved over the cask of ship's rum, every drop of it, and the kraken took it down into the swell, and the stars came out again, bright and indifferent over the ruined ship.