Pencil-style drawing of a horned skull-headed octopus with suckered tentacles on aged paper, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Horned skull octopus tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of an octopus whose head is a horned, hollow-eyed skull, with tentacles curling across the page and ending in small spiral tips. The shading is dense black and grey pencil or ink, with heavy hatching on the skull and suckers drawn as rings along the tentacles. The design sits centrally on a mottled, cream-coloured paper background.

Octopus Skull Horn Tentacle Sucker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull came up in Mr Pollard's net on the Tuesday after the herring failed, and nobody on Scarrow Quay would touch it with a gaff. It was the size of a churn and grey as wet slate, with two horns curling back over its brow like the prow of a boat. Its arms hung through the mesh in loops, and at the end of each one was a small black spiral, neat as a watch spring.

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My father wanted it gutted for the glue works in Penzance. He said a thing that ugly ought to be worth something. Mother said nothing. She sat by the window counting the rings on the arm nearest the door, one for every sucker, and by supper she had reached two hundred and eleven and started again from the beginning.

We took it out past the breakwater on the turn of the tide, Father at the tiller and me holding the net's cork line. When the sack went over, the water went flat and wrong, and the lamp in the lighthouse went out on its own. Three arms slid up the gunwale before he could cut them loose, and I saw the rings glow pale as coins in the dark.

In the morning the harbour wall was pricked all over with black spirals, each pressed into the lime mortar as if someone had rolled a pen across it while we slept. Father never went out again. He sold the boat for scrap and kept one horn, which had snapped off in the net and fallen into the bilge, on the mantelpiece beside the clock. Some nights I hear it tick against the tiles, though nothing in the room is moving.