Black and grey realism tattoo of a human skull wrapped in octopus tentacles, spanning the shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and octopus tentacles on shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull sits across the shoulder and upper back, with octopus tentacles curling around it and over the edge of the shoulder. The skull and tentacles are rendered in soft, smooth shading with fine highlights on the suckers, and the ink is entirely black and grey. The composition fills the frame diagonally, with the tentacles leading the eye from the upper left towards the lower right.

Realism Shoulder Back Skull Octopus Tentacle Sucker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the range, the one with the cracked kettle, because this is the bit my mother always skipped, and I'll not have you leave before the end. Old Ada Pringle kept the boarding house at Scald Point for forty years, and every guest she ever took was told the same thing on their first night: never take a room with the north wall. Mr Haskett took it anyway. He was a bone-setter from Hull with a bad hip and no patience for superstition.

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The trouble started with the sound. Every night once the tide turned there came a tapping from behind the wallpaper, slow and round, like a man knocking with a knuckle wrapped in wet rag. Haskett pulled the paper down with a butter knife one February, and behind it sat a skull, jammed into the brick with its jaw hanging open. Something had grown across it. Tentacles, grey as candle wax, with rows of suckers pale as tuppenny pieces, curled over the bone and spilled out across the plaster as if they meant to lift the whole house off its footings.

Haskett was a practical man. He carried the skull down to the harbour in a fish crate and tipped it off the end of the pier. Ada watched from the window and saw the arms rise out of the water, the whole dark crown of them, reaching for the wooden steps. He came back up the cliff path without his hat and never said a word about it, except that the tapping stopped. Three nights later he woke to find his bedroom door standing open and a neat ring of wet suckers printed across his pillow.

So if ever you find yourself in a room with a northern wall, lad, mind where you lay your head. It only wants a bit of company.