Black and grey pen drawing of a human skull with octopus tentacles wrapping around and below it, on a textured pale background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and octopus tentacle design

Black and grey · Flash

A drawn design showing a human skull at the top, with octopus tentacles curling around its sides and dropping below it into a tangled lower section. The linework is dark and sketchy, with stippled suckers along the tentacles and soft shading on the skull. The image is black and grey on a distressed, mottled background with dark vignetted edges.

Skull Octopus Tentacle Sucker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clockwork in the lamp room has seized again, so you climb the iron stair at two in the morning with a tin of oil and the skull in your coat pocket, the one you pulled from the rockpool below the north ledge. Mrs Penhallow swears it belonged to a sheep, and she is wrong about that. Its eye sockets hold two chips of sea glass, green and clouded, and when you set it on the sill the beam sweeps across them every nineteen seconds.

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Below, the tide is making. You can hear it working at the bare rock like someone sorting cutlery in the next room. The octopus came up in the pot net on Tuesday, a big grey mother, and you let it go off the slipway because Jory said keeping it would bring bad luck. Its arms kept returning to the boat for hours afterwards, long after the fish had drifted off the bottom. Now you feel them on the stair rail, cold and suckered, wrapping the iron as you climb.

You wind the spring. The lamp catches and throws its white bar out over the water, and for a moment every wave in the bay is lit at once, tentacles and all, a tangle of silver lifting out of the dark to search for the boat that is not coming in. You know it is not coming. Mrs Penhallow's son went out on the Tuesday ebb, and the light did nothing for him then either.

You set the skull back on the sill, facing the sea, and tell it the lamp is lit. Below, something lets go of the rock and slides into the black water without a sound. In the morning your coat pocket is wet and smells of salt, and the sill is bare except for a ring of small wet marks pressed into the glass.