Neo-traditional style line drawing of a woman with octopus tentacles and a sailing ship, shaded in red wash on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with octopus tentacles and a ship

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A pencil-like line drawing shows a woman's face and shoulders framed by curling octopus tentacles, with wavy hair and a ship with rigging in the upper right. The black outlines are fine and even, with the hair and tentacles filled with stripes and dotted suckers. The colour is a soft red or pink wash over a cream background, and the composition fills the whole sheet with the figure at the centre.

Neo-trad Woman Octopus Tentacle Ship Portrait Hair Wave Sucker Pearl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

We had been three weeks out of Bristol when the bosun found the lazarette hatch standing open and the lamp still warm. Nobody admitted to it. Mr Haddow swore he had bolted it himself, and the cook swore he had seen nothing but his own bread rising in the galley. Only the tallow was gone, and a trail of wet prints ran from the hatch to the rail, each one the size of a saucer.

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Eliza Crane, the carpenter's daughter, had come aboard at Lundy with a sea-chest of books and no reason she would give. She sat on the forecastle through the afternoon watch with her sleeves rolled, feeding scraps of salt beef over the side to something that kept lifting its arms out of the grey water. Its suckers were pale as pearls, and each one, she told me, remembered a name.

On the fourth night the wind dropped and the sea went flat as slate. I woke to the creak of the mainmast and found her at the rail, hair loose and rippling like wet rope, a cluster of arms curled round the rigging as easily as a mother holds a child. She did not turn. She said the captain had carved his own name into the timber of the Lydia's bow, and that the sea had been keeping account ever since.

By dawn the swell was rising again. Eliza was gone, and the tallow lamp stood lit on the hatch with its wick trimmed neat. I still tell the story in every port I put into, and I still look for her in the crests off Finisterre, where something pale turns over, slow and unhurried, as if reading the names of everyone who sailed out of Bristol and never came home.