Black and grey drawing of a skull wrapped in octopus tentacles with a ship's anchor behind it, shown as a design on a dark background.

Skull, anchor and tentacles design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed monochrome drawing of a human skull with a ship's anchor behind and below it, and octopus tentacles curling around both. The linework is fine and dense, with white highlights on the bone, the anchor's wooden stock and the tentacle suckers against a near-black background. The composition is centred and vertical, with the skull in the upper half and the anchor's flukes spreading across the bottom.

Skull Anchor Octopus Tentacle Sucker Wood Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper before me left a bone on the windowsill, and I never learned whose it was. Wind had worked at the glass all winter, and on the third night of the gale the lamp at Scarrow Head guttered and died with a sound like a held breath let go. I climbed the iron stair with a paraffin can in one hand and a lantern in the other. When I reached the gallery the sea was black to the rail, and something lay across the landing rock where the tide had thrown it: a ship's anchor, its stock of grey oak split and silvered by salt.

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Wrapped round the shank was an octopus, or the part of one that had not yet let go. Its arms were pale and ringed with suckers the size of shillings, and they opened and closed when my lantern touched them, slow as a sleeper's hand. Beneath the flukes, half sunk in weed, a skull watched me with its jaw hanging loose. I thought of the bone on the sill and felt foolish for thinking it. The arm drew tighter round the iron, as if it were guarding the thing and not holding it.

I did not sleep that night. I sat by the lamp with the ledger open and wrote the weather down, the bearings, the wreck I could not see. At four the water drew back over the rock with a long hiss, and when I went out again the anchor was gone and the skull lay alone on the shingle, its brow turned towards the light. The tentacle had slid back into the surf and left a clean, pale track behind it.

I trimmed the wick and the beam swung out across the water. In the ledger I wrote that the tide had taken the anchor, which was true enough. Below the gallery, the skull had turned its empty face up towards the glass, as though it had been waiting all along for someone to keep the light.