Black and white flash drawing of an anchor wrapped in tentacles with a banner reading LOVECRAFT and H.P., in a traditional engraved style with no body placement shown.

Anchor with tentacles and banner design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn tattoo design on black paper showing an anchor wrapped in suckered tentacles, with a rope-like banner scroll reading H.P. and LOVECRAFT. The linework uses fine hatching and stippling in white or pale grey ink on a dark ground, with radiating sunburst rays behind the anchor. Two black and white pens lie at the right edge of the sheet on a wooden surface.

Traditional Anchor Tentacle Octopus Banner Lettering Sunburst Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shift bell at Wheal Hester rang twice before dawn, and you were already at the cage with your lamp unlit because the oil was low and Tom Penhallow swore the rock would give enough light. The adit ran out under the sea floor, a mile of stone with grey water pressing on the far side of it. Nobody spoke on the descent. The chains sang against the shaft wall all the way down.

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At the thirty-fathom level the water had come through the back of the drift in a slow sheet, and the men had stacked sandbags and gone round it. Penhallow lifted his lamp to a wall where the stone had turned soft and pale, like the inside of a shell. Something knocked from within, three measured blows, then a long drag like wet rope over timber. He said it was an old pipe settling. You had heard that same knocking the night before, through the floor of your cottage above the harbour, and you had not mentioned it to him.

They broke through with a bar. The sea came in warm and green, and in the rock behind it lay a great iron anchor, its flukes wreathed in ropes of something that was not rope, each sucker-ring the size of a pewter plate. Above it, cut into the vein, ran a ribbon of stone bearing letters nobody could read. Penhallow reached for the nearest arm and it closed on his wrist gently, the way a child takes a hand crossing a road.

You climbed back up with the others and told the captain the level was sound. At the surface the rope through your fingers was still slick, and the air above the engine house smelled of brine and lamp oil. That night you hung your lamp by the door and left it burning, and you listened for three knocks from under the floorboards, and when they came you answered them.