Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull with octopus tentacles across the back of a shaved head, with ear piercings visible on either side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus and skull on a shaved head

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A skull is rendered in highly shaded black and grey, with octopus tentacles wrapping over the crown and down the sides of the head. The suckers are picked out in light grey and the bone has detailed highlights, giving a three-dimensional effect. The photograph is taken from behind against a plain black background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Realism Other Skull Octopus Tentacle Sucker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They say the Widow of Harrowmouth kept her husband's skull on the windowsill of the net loft, and that the sea came up the cobbles every spring to look at it. Nobody in the town would touch the thing, so when old Edric Tull fished it out of the tidal gully with his boathook, he wrapped it in tarred sailcloth and carried it up the hill without a word to anyone. The sea had been unusually quiet that week, and the gulls had stopped landing on the quay.

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The octopus came to the loft on the third night. It did not climb through the window so much as pour through the gap under the door, a grey slick of arms that smelled of kelp and cold iron. Edric heard the suckers tapping the floorboards like a slow clock, one ring at a time, and then the tentacles were up the bedpost and over the sill, feeling for the skull the way a blind woman feels for a face.

Maud, the widow's daughter, had kept the tide book since she was nine, and she knew the moon was dark. She went down to the steps with a candle and a bucket of brine and found the creature coiled among the weed, one arm still lifted toward the town, its pale rings dimming as the lamplight reached them. She poured the brine over its head and said the names of every drowned man in the parish, one by one, until the arms let go of the stone.

In the morning the skull sat on the sill exactly where Edric had left it, but someone had turned it to face the water. Its sockets were full of small grey pebbles, each one ringed like a sucker, and the tide was already coming in.