Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing an octopus with tentacles wrapped around a dreamcatcher hoop, with feathers hanging below, in black and grey shading.

Octopus wrapped around a dreamcatcher

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an octopus with its tentacles curled around a circular dreamcatcher hoop, with a flower of life pattern inside the ring. Three feathers hang from the lower tentacles and the frame. The linework is fine and the octopus is shaded with stippled dots and soft graphite tones on plain paper.

Octopus Tentacle Dreamcatcher Feather Flower of life Hoop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Penhallow had hung the hoop above the bath taps the week the summer lodgers arrived, and by Thursday the octopus had come up the slipway to see it. Nobody at Gull Rock Lodgings saw it climb. They found it in the morning, three arms looped round the brass ring, the fourth arm dangling a feather into the drain, and the water in the bath still warm.

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Her son Tom said it wanted rescuing, so he fetched the rowing boat and the gaff hook, but the octopus would not let go of anything. It only shifted its grip, the way a man shifts in a chair when he is not ready to get up. Mrs Penhallow watched from the back step with a cup going cold in her hands. Old Bessie Tregear, who had kept the lodge before her, used to say octopuses were the sea's own dreamcatchers, that they caught whatever drifted by and kept it in the dark until it wore smooth. Mrs Penhallow had always thought that a tale for tourists.

Then the young schoolmaster from the upstairs room came down at dawn, pale as chalk, and said he had dreamt of his brother's boat going out and never coming in. The feathers on the hoop were wet. He did not ask why. Mrs Penhallow took the gaff from Tom, reached up, cut the cord at the top of the ring, and let the whole thing sink slowly into the grey water of the cove, octopus and all, with the feathers trailing after like weed. The schoolmaster slept that night without stirring. In the morning the hoop was back on its nail, empty, and the bath was cold.