Skull and tentacles design on aged paper
Black and grey · Flash
A horned skull with empty eye sockets sits at the upper right, with several octopus tentacles wrapping and looping down and across the page. The tentacles are rendered with dense hatching, cross-hatching and soft shading, and the suckers are drawn in detail along their undersides. The drawing is entirely black and grey on a textured, stained beige background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The landlady's ledger said the room had been paid for until Michaelmas, which was odd, because the sea had taken the last tenant in March and nobody had thought to cancel him. You found the key under a saucer of cold tea on the hall table, just where Mrs Vosper said it would be, and you climbed the stairs with the damp coming off the walls in long cold sheets.
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On the washstand someone had left a sheet of paper gone the colour of weak tea, and on it a skull with a horn curling off its crown, octopus arms looping out of its jaw and down across the page. The ink was so fine you could count the suckers. Every one of them looked wet.
The arms began to move when you turned to the window. Not much. A coil tightened around the margin, the way a sleeper pulls a blanket up. Below, the tide was going out over the groynes, and the bell buoy off Carrick Rock had stopped its tolling, which meant someone had cut it loose.
By morning Mrs Vosper had set a third place at breakfast, and the drawing was pinned above the stairs with a brass tack, its lowest tentacle now ending in a neat curl over the edge of the frame, as if it had been reaching for the rail. Nobody in the boarding house mentioned the room. Nobody needed to. The tea was still cold, and the stairs were still wet with salt.
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