Black and grey back tattoo of a sailing ship, a lighthouse and a large kraken with tentacles rising through waves, in a traditional nautical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kraken, sailing ship and lighthouse across a back

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows a three-masted sailing ship on the left and a lighthouse on the right, both set among rolling waves and clouds with rays of light breaking through. A large kraken rises from the sea at the centre, its tentacles curling around the ship and lighthouse. The work is rendered in black and grey with detailed shading on the sails, tower and water, and the composition fills the whole upper back.

Traditional Back Ship Sailing ship Lighthouse Octopus Tentacle Wave Sea Cloud Sun rays

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marguerite was three days out from Falmouth when the swell began to lift under her in long grey shoulders, and Captain Ansel Rudd stopped looking at the headland. Mabel Tregear saw him stop from the gallery of Scarrow lighthouse, where she had been counting ships since her father's knees gave out. Nineteen autumns she had kept that lamp. She knew the Marguerite's sails the way other women knew their husbands' coats.

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On the third night the water went black and still, and then the arms came up out of it. They were thick as mooring posts and they wrapped the rigging with a slow, unbothered patience, the way a woman might wind wool. Mabel heard the crack of the mainmast from two miles off. She did not wait to see it fall. She ran down the spiral stair with her skirts in her fists and hauled the shutter wide, then wider, until the beam swept the swell like a blade.

The kraken turned its head towards the light. Its eye was the size of a cartwheel and it watched her for a long moment before it loosened the ship and sank, leaving a rope of foam and one drowned sail. In the morning the Marguerite limped into harbour under jury-rigged canvas, and Captain Rudd climbed the headland path alone with his cap in his hands.

He asked what she wanted for it. Mabel told him to settle the oil account with the merchant in Penzance, who had been overcharging her since Michaelmas. Then she trimmed the wick, climbed back to the gallery, and kept the lamp burning until the sun came up through the cloud like brass poured from a jug.