Neo-traditional coloured pencil design of a pink octopus wrapped around a blue anchor, with a cream skull and a banner reading NO MANS LAND.

Octopus with anchor and skull design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A pink octopus with green-spotted tentacles coils around a blue anchor, with a cream skull resting on the lower shank. A banner across the bottom reads NO MANS LAND in black lettering. Bold black outlines, white highlights on the tentacles and coloured pencil shading give the drawing a flat, graphic finish on a white sketchbook page.

Neo-trad Octopus Anchor Skull Tentacle Banner Lettering Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the lamp still, boy, I'm not telling this twice. The anchor came up in the Kestrel's dredge at first light, off the bank the charts call No Man's Land, and it was wearing an octopus like a wet shawl. Pink as a boiled prawn, every arm knotted round the shank, and the green spots on those arms blinking at us like the lamps of a town that wasn't there.

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Skipper Dunn wanted the line cut. Ada Sowerby, who was mate that year and had hands like tarred rope, said a thing that holds on that hard has a reason, and she went down on her knees on the wet boards with a gaff to coax it loose. Somebody had lashed a cream skull to the lower fluke, grinning as if it knew the joke, and a strip of tin with NO MANS LAND scratched into it was nailed to the crown. Nobody aboard had ever seen either before, and nobody who came after us ever admitted to them.

It let go of the iron a finger at a time, and it wasn't rough about it. It took Ada's glove off instead, slow as a man folding a letter, then slid back over the gunwale and was gone under the grey. The anchor came up clean. The skull dropped into the bilge and stayed there, and I've kept it since, though I'll not show it to you.

So when you ask me whose the bank is, I tell you it isn't no man's at all. Every dawn since, a single green-spotted arm has curled over the rail of the Kestrel before the engine catches, and the nets come up heavy on that ground. Ada left her glove on the hook. I still leave a bit of bait on the rail for the tenant. Fair's fair, lad, and the cod are cheaper than rent.