Greyscale pencil drawing of an octopus with its tentacles wrapped around a human skull, shown on paper on a wooden desk.

Octopus wrapped around a skull drawing

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed graphite drawing of a large octopus whose tentacles curl around and over a human skull, with the skull's eye sockets and teeth in shadow. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and smoothly blended, giving the suckers and skin a strong sense of three-dimensional form. The composition fills a sheet of paper that sits on a wooden desk beside pencils and an eraser.

Realism Octopus Skull Tentacle Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pardoe kept the skull on the parlour dresser, between the tide tables and a jar of mismatched buttons, and no lodger at Seaview House was allowed to move it. It had turned up in the winter the boiler failed, along with a smell of brine and a line of wet footprints that stopped at the cellar door. Nobody admitted to bringing it in.

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The octopus came in March. I found it at six, fetching the milk, with the back door swinging on its hinge. It was in the coal bunker, a mottled grey thing the size of a hearthrug, and it had three arms wound around a skull, holding it the way you would hold a loaf to keep it warm. Its eyes followed me across the yard. I have been a lodger for nineteen years and never felt so thoroughly assessed.

I did not tell her. I left a crab from the fishmonger's tray on the bunker step, then another the next morning, and by April the milk was going cold while I sat on an upturned bucket watching it turn the skull slowly in its suckers, as if checking the teeth for lies. The arms were careful. They were the hands of someone who had been asked to mind a thing and meant to do it properly.

On the last Sunday of the month the bunker stood empty. The skull sat on the dresser exactly where it had always been, and a single sucker print had dried on the windowpane above it, pale as a coin. Mrs Pardoe dusted around it. I never saw the creature leave, and I have stopped asking the tide when it means to come back.