Red pencil sketch of an octopus with curling tentacles and suckers, drawn as a tattoo design with no placement on the body shown.

Octopus with curling tentacles sketch

Colour · Flash

A red pencil sketch of an octopus with its head at upper left and several tentacles curling outwards and around the lower half of the page. The linework is fine and loose, with soft shading along the head and body and small circular suckers drawn along the undersides of the tentacles. The subject fills the centre of a plain white sheet with the tentacle tips curling into spirals.

Octopus Tentacle Sucker Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice on Low Pond had not held a cow's weight since before Candlemas, so when Ada Penrose cracked the trough open with the back of the axe, she expected to find only black water and a drowned hen. Instead a tentacle came up through the gap, pale as tallow, and curled once round the handle of her bucket as though asking for it.

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The octopus had come, her brother said, in the frost of the first week, the same way the eels came, out of nowhere and into the ditches. It had taken every carp from the pond and most of the ducks besides. Ada had no wish to be friends with anything that ate ducks. But the cattle were bawling for water, the pump was frozen to its pipe, and the thing waited under the ice with its arms folded in neat loops, patient as a bailiff.

She brought it kitchen scraps: potato peel, the fat from Sunday's mutton, a saucer of skimmed milk that it drank with a sound like someone sucking a sweet. Each morning it lifted the ice from the trough so the herd could drink, and each morning she left it the first of the bread. Neither of them spoke of terms. The tentacles spoke for it, tapping a rhythm on the iron rim whenever the feed was late.

The thaw came in March. Ada went out to find the trough empty and the pond running clear, and on the rim, where the ice had been, she found a ring of small round marks, pressed in as neat as a row of coins. She left the marks alone. Every winter after, she counted them before she broke the ice.