Black ink flash drawing of an octopus with curling tentacles wrapped around a dotwork mandala, shown on white paper with no body placement.

Octopus and mandala design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of an octopus with its head turned to the right, its tentacles curling around and behind a large circular mandala. The octopus is shaded with fine hatching and stippled dots, and the mandala is built from layered petals and dotted geometric rings. The design is entirely black and grey, drawn on white paper beside two black fineliner pens.

Dotwork Geometric Octopus Mandala Tentacle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mandala had been Ines's idea, a rose window of petals and rings that she meant to scratch into the glass of the lamp room, and by the third week of October the octopus had got into the drawings the way damp gets into a cellar. Her father had taken the Hollin Rock station from his own father, and the logbook was full of tides and gulls and one unexplained entry in 1911 that read only: Tentacle at the gallery rail, 3 a.m., gone by four.

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On the night the fog came in thick off the point, she climbed up with a thermos and found the rail wet and the lamp turning on its slow brass wheel, and there was something sitting in the lantern's glow, its head tilted as if listening to the mechanism. It did not look at her so much as past her, toward the mainland lights that had gone soft and yellow. Its arms lay curled around the iron like the coils of a spring, each sucker dotted with pale rings that caught the beam and threw it back in small bright ciphers.

She did not speak. Her father had taught her that the sea only asked for two things from a keeper, which were to keep the light lit and to keep the log honest. So she wrote, by the red torch, in careful capitals: OCTOPUS AT GALLERY. SHE DOES NOT MIND THE LAMP. Then she poured tea into the cup lid and set it on the rail, and the arm nearest it unfurled, touched the rim once, and drew back.

In the morning the rail was dry and the mandala was waiting on her drawing board, petals opened wider than she had left them, a seventh ring pressed in by a hand that was not hers.