Blue pen sketch of a sailing ship inside a bottle, with a kraken's tentacles reaching up from the waves beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ship in a bottle with kraken sketch

Colour · Flash

A blue ballpoint pen drawing of a three-masted sailing ship sealed inside a glass bottle, with its corked neck and rope at the lower left. A large octopus or kraken with curling tentacles rises from the waves on the right, facing the ship. The linework uses hatching and cross-hatching for the sea, sails and glass, and the drawing sits on cream paper.

Ship Bottle Octopus Sea Wave Sail Rope

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bottle came through the freight shed at Tilbury with a declaration taped to its neck that read only: one vessel, sealed, do not uncork. I had worked the inbound desk for nineteen years and had never once been asked to admit a ship.

Keep reading

I held it up under the strip light. The glass was thick and faintly green at the base, and inside, a three-master leaned into a wind I could not feel, its sails hatched so finely they looked like breath on a window. Off the starboard quarter a kraken was rising, arms curling out of the waves like someone reaching for a rail. The cord round the cork was tied in a clove hitch with the tail left long enough to pull, the same knot my grandfather used on his crab pots.

Dennis, my supervisor, wanted it sent back. Nothing in the regulations covered sealed weather, he said. I pointed out that the sea inside had been drawn in the same blue biro as the declaration, and that the capitals on the form matched the ones in my grandfather's logbook, which I had kept in a drawer since the funeral. Dennis said handwriting was not a commodity, and he was probably right, but he signed the form anyway.

In the end I stamped it admitted and put it on the shelf above the kettle, where the morning light comes in sideways. Some days I check that the ship still leans the same way. It always does, and the octopus is always a little nearer the rail.