Pencil sketch of an octopus with curled tentacles wrapped around a trident, drawn on white paper as a tattoo design.

Octopus wrapped around a trident sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an octopus with its head facing right, its tentacles curling around a vertical trident that runs through the centre of the image. The linework is detailed, with suckers drawn along the tentacles and shading on the head and under the arms to give volume. The drawing is black and grey on a plain white sheet, with the subject filling the centre of the frame.

Octopus Trident Tentacle Sea creature

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The octopus had the trident again when I reached the tank, her arms wound round the shaft as if she were taking the weight off a tired man. Dad bought the fork from a scrap dealer in Hull in 1979 and swore it had stood on a Victorian pier-end show. Every season since, he nailed it to the back of the Neptune booth so the punters would believe the animal was guarding it.

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The lads called her Dolly, though Dad would never have it. She had a bruise-coloured eye and a habit of slipping through the gap under the lid at closing time. In my first season I spent three nights on my knees in the sawdust, hauling her back from the generator cable. She never once bit me. She just looked at me the way a landlady looks at a late rent.

Last Sunday, with rain blowing sideways across the car park at Stockport, I found the trident leaning against the glass instead of hung on its hook. Dolly had lifted it out. Four arms were braced on the side of the tank, and the fifth was coiled so tight around the handle that the ash had split. I thought she was after the fork. Then I saw a pale arm uncurl at the bottom of the water and lift something into the light: the brass key to the lorry, which Dad had dropped into that tank the week before he died and which I had told myself was gone for good.

I dried the key on my jumper and hung the trident back on its hook myself. I left the lid off that night, and she left the fork alone.