Pen and ink tattoo design sketch of a kraken with tentacles wrapping a sailing ship, with lightning bolts and ornate scrollwork in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kraken wrapped around a sailing ship

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A pen drawing of a kraken with its tentacles coiling around a three-masted sailing ship, with lightning bolts, waves and a small ship's wheel above. The linework is dark and even, with ornate scrollwork framing the design and blue pencil shading on the creature's head and eyes. The image is centred on a white sheet with a pen and a blue pencil at the left edge.

Neo-trad Ship Sailing ship Tentacle Lightning Scrollwork Ship's wheel Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marigold had been three days out of Saltmarrow when the lightning started, and Hester Pell, who had sold the captain the hemp that held her sails, swore afterwards that the sky over the breakwater had been clear. She stood at the chandlery window with a ledger under one arm and watched the harbour lamps go out one by one, as though someone past the point were counting them down.

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The Ship Inn had its version by supper. A squid the size of the church roof had been seen off the Greaves, arms thick as mainmasts, and old Mags the net-mender said that krakens followed ships that owed them something. Hester thought of the cheap line she had sold Captain Venn when the good stuff was spoken for, the line she had sworn was sound. Her brother Tobias was the Marigold's cook. He had written that the captain liked his figgy duff and that the sea was flat as a plate.

The Marigold came in on the morning ebb with her foresails in ribbons and her rigging hung with something grey and glistening that the harbourmaster would not touch. Tobias was on the quay, soaked and grinning, holding a brass ship's wheel he had cut free from the binnacle. He said the thing had wrapped the ship twice, then let go all at once, as if it had been asked a question and given its answer.

Hester did not say anything about the cheap line. She knelt on the wet stones and tied him a bowline the way their father had taught them, and when she gave the rope a tug, the sea beyond the wall gave one back.