Black and grey full back tattoo of a bearded pirate with an eyepatch and tricorn hat, beside sailing ships, an octopus tentacle and a treasure chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pirate scene across a full back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece showing a bearded pirate in a tricorn hat and eyepatch, holding a pistol, with a sailing ship in the background. Around the figure sit an octopus tentacle, a treasure chest, a ship's wheel and a cannon. The work uses soft grey shading and detailed linework across the whole back, with no colour ink visible.

Realism Back Pirate Ship Octopus Tentacle Ship wheel Pistol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had already swallowed the lower steps of Carrick Keep when Hester Vane spotted the cannon, half-buried in shingle beneath the broken curtain wall, its muzzle still pointed at the water as if it expected a Spanish sail. She knelt in the weed and scraped rust from the carriage with her knife. Above her, her brother Tam was bellowing that the squall was coming over Skerry Point and they had until the bell buoy vanished to get off the rocks.

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She ignored him. The ledger in the chandler's shop had been plain about it. Captain Ruadh Crane had hidden his share in the cellars of the keep before he sailed away one-eyed and rich, and the only thing anyone had found since was a ship's wheel, washed into the lee of the gatehouse three winters back with an octopus wrapped around its spokes. Locals said the creature guarded the hoard. Hester thought it more likely the beast had simply liked the warm timber of the wreck.

The cellar door was under a drift of kelp. Inside, the chest sat on a shelf of dry stone, iron-bound and heavier than it had any right to be. She prised the lid with the cannon's old ramrod. There was no gold. There was a tricorn hat folded over a single pistol, and beneath them a sheet of paper in a hand as steady as a rudder: The sea keeps what it is given. Take the wheel home and stop counting the coins.

Tam's voice came down the stairs, thin and frightened. Hester closed the lid, tucked the pistol into her belt, and climbed up into the wind with nothing in her hands but the paper.