Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Pirate ship and octopus full sleeve
Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo
A full sleeve tattoo shown in four photographs of the same arm, covering the upper arm and forearm. A red-sailed ship sits in a storm under dark clouds and orange lightning, above green waves, with an octopus, sharks and fish in the water below and a sunken ship or anchor near the bottom. Bold outlines and strong, saturated colour dominate, with the greens and reds contrasting against the grey sky.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Nobody aboard the Mary Ashkettle believed the anchor would hold, least of all Old Pell, who had lashed it down himself with the wrong knots. The lightning came in off the Dogger shoals in orange sheets, and each time it lit the sails the crew saw the red canvas drawn taut as a drum skin. Each time it went dark they heard the sea climbing the bow.
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Captain Idris Fenn had the cable cut at the third bell of the middle watch. The anchor went down with a noise like a church door slamming, and the ship lurched off the reef. Below, the iron slid through green dark, past a shoal of mackerel and a hungry grey shark, down to the wreck of the Juniper Bell, where it fluked itself into the rotten timbers and stayed. Something very large had been living in that wreck for a long time, and it did not care to be disturbed.
By dawn the squall had blown itself out, and the Mary lay becalmed on a sea the colour of bottle glass. Pell swore the anchor was lost for good and drank his grief in rum. Fenn said nothing and kept his eyes on the water. Three weeks later, when they limped into Whitby with patched sails, a fishwife on the quay pointed at a dripping bundle of rope and a lantern lashed to its end, and asked whether anybody had lost a light.
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