Pencil sketch of a cartoon octopus with a bow and eyelashes, its tentacles shaded with suckers, drawn as a tattoo design on sketchbook paper.

Cartoon octopus with bow design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a cartoon octopus with large eyes, eyelashes and a bow on its head, with curling tentacles covered in suckers. The linework is dark and confident, with soft graphite shading across the head and tentacles that gives them volume. The design fills most of a white sketchbook page, with a pencil resting across the top.

Octopus Tentacle Bow Eyelashes Sucker Sketch

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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

Hush now, and pass me the lamp, because the tide is coming up the Glass Steps and the old ones say it brings the bow-headed octopus with it. Mabel Okonedo's grandmother swore she saw it once, off the drowned pier at Margate, rising through the grey with great pale eyes and lashes as long as fishing line, a silk bow tied on top of its head like a girl going to chapel.

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The creature was called Tuppence by the harbour children, and all she wanted was to be admired. She had eight arms that curled at the tips like new fern, each one dotted with rings that caught the light. The salvage crews fled from her and the drones spun away on their wires, but one winter the harbour froze solid and the fishing boats sat trapped in the ice. A boy named Ansel Crane went out across the white to fetch his father's nets, and the ice began to sing under his boots.

It cracked beneath him. Tuppence rose up through the black hole, lifted him on one curled arm as carefully as a teacup, and held him above the water while he shouted himself hoarse. She only blinked, lashes fluttering, and straightened her bow with the tip of a sucker. Then she pressed another arm flat to the broken ice, and wherever it touched, the water went hard and blue as a china plate, and she walked him back to the shore on it.

The nets were never found. Ansel came home with nothing but a silk ribbon wound round his wrist and a rule for his children: when a creature with lashes asks you to sit with her a while, you sit. My grandmother never learned whether that bow was a gift or a warning. Mind the lamp, and mind the tide.