Four purple ink sketches of cats with octopus tentacles for bodies, arranged in a grid on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and octopus hybrid sketches

Colour · Flash

Four small sketches show cat heads merged with octopus tentacles, each drawn in loose, sketchy purple linework with a few shaded details on the faces. The designs are arranged in a two by two grid on a plain white background, with varied head angles and tentacle positions. The drawings are in one colour of ink, with no shading beyond light hatching and no body part visible.

Cat Octopus Sketch Tentacle

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

Brother Anselm had been told twice by the prior that marginal creatures were the devil's idle thumbprints, and still the ink on his thumb was purple, because the only pot of violet left in the scriptorium had cracked and he had stretched the last of it with gall and oil. Brother Cuthbert, who copied the psalms beside him, did not look up. "Your cat has eight arms again," he said.

Keep reading

"It is an octopus with ambitions," Anselm said. He had drawn four of them that week on the spare vellum, one for each corner of the Lenten office, and each had come out differently: one sleepy, folded over its own tentacles like a cushion; one with its ears pinned flat; one squinting at the sea in the lower margin of a psalter where there was no sea at all. The abbot had asked for the sea to be drawn in blue. Anselm had drawn fish instead, and the fish were cats too.

On the last evening of the fast, a brown-sailed barge put in at the mill jetty below the walls, and a boatman who smelled of brine and tar came up the hill with a crate of eels and word that the wheat would come on Thursday. He stopped at the scriptorium door, saw the sheets pinned to the drying line, and laughed until he had to sit on the step. "Where did you see such a beast?" he asked. Anselm said nothing, because he had not seen one. He had simply drawn what the margins seemed to want, the way a hand knows where a stain should fall.

The boatman took the smallest sketch home, folded inside his jerkin. The wheat came on Thursday, and with it a letter from the coast saying the octopus had been seen in the harbour at Wells, wearing a lady's collar. Anselm kept the other three. He drew the cats again every Lent after that, and never once gave them a sea.