Black ink drawing of a skull with knotted octopus tentacles on white paper, shaded with fine hatching and stippling.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and tentacles design drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a human skull whose jaw and cheekbones merge into the head of an octopus, with long tentacles curling down and across the page. The linework uses dense hatching and stippling to model the bone and suckers, with the tentacles crossing and looping over one another. The image is in black ink on a plain white background, with the subject placed in the upper right and the tentacles extending to the lower left.

Skull Octopus Tentacle

Find an artist for this

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 snow sealed the Gallows Road on the second night, so the carrier from Wexcombe never came, and the four of us left at the Drowned Anchor stopped pretending the wet on the cellar steps was only the thaw. Mrs Pellow kept the kettle on the hob. Her son Tobias sat by the shutters counting the bolts, touching each one as if it might have shifted while he wasn't looking.

Keep reading

The drawing was the reason none of us said much. Old Amos Crane had nailed it above the bar before I was born, a skull with its jaw spread into a hood of arms, the arms looping over the beams and down the plaster in ink as fine as hair. He never said where it came from. The ledger only notes that he took it in lieu of a debt. Tonight the lamp beneath it guttered, and in the shadow the loops seemed to have crept an inch lower, reaching for the cold tallow on the counter.

Mrs Pellow said the sea was eight miles off and that ink does not move. Tobias took the lantern down to check the barrels and called up that the flagstones were warm. Then he called that he could not feel the bottom step. I went down with the poker and found the flour sacks pressed with rings, round and neat as coins, a dozen wet trails leading under the cask racks toward the old sluice grate.

I did not call him up. I dragged the settle across the cellar door and sat with my back to it while the fire sank. On the third morning the thaw came and the carrier found the inn with its door unbarred and the hearth gone grey. Above the bar the skull still hung in its tangle of ink, but one long arm had come down the wall to the floor and stopped, wet at the tip, just short of the settle.