Black and grey engraved skull design built from an octopus, fish, shells and an anchor, in a detailed flash style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sea creature skull with anchor

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black and white drawing of a human skull formed from marine life, with an octopus wrapping over the cranium and fish, lobsters and shells filling the bones. A central anchor runs down the face, with rope detail and a small banner lettered within the design. The linework is dense and engraved, with fine hatching for shading and no colour.

Skull Octopus Anchor Fish Shell Rope Tentacle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The octopus had been in the net since before dawn, and Ada Pryor would not let the boy throw it back. "It's got the look of a thing that wants drawing," she said, tipping it onto the slate bench of the net loft at Staithes, where the light came grey through salt-clouded panes.

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Edwin Coult had been gone eleven weeks, taken off the Dogger Bank when the squall cracked the Dolphin's mainmast. His mother wanted a stone with a lamb on it. Ada wanted something she could not have explained to the vicar: a skull built from everything the sea had kept of him. She set a lobster for the hinge of the jaw, cockle shells for the cheekbones, and laid mackerel ribs along the seams of the crown like sutures. Down the centre of the face she ran his father's anchor, and she had the rope-maker's girl twist a line of tarred hemp to bind it.

The octopus was the hard part. She drew its arms over the top of the skull twice, and both times the ink fell into something like hair. On the third try she gave each sucker a tiny ring of shading, lightly, the way you would count stitches, and the whole head began to look less like a drowning and more like a sleeper turned face down to the tide.

When Mrs Coult came to the loft, she held the sheet to the window for a long time. "Where is his face?" she asked at last. Ada pointed with her pen to the small banner beneath the anchor, where she had lettered his name in the same careful script as the parish register. "The sea kept his face," Ada said. "I've only given it somewhere to sit."