Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull with octopus tentacles

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A skull is shown front on, with octopus tentacles rising from its top and curling outwards on both sides. The linework uses fine hatching and stippling for shading on the tentacles and bone, with solid black areas in the eye sockets and teeth. The design is in black ink on a white background, and the dripping black ink below the skull fills the lower part of the composition.

Blackwork Skull Octopus Tentacle

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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

Mind the rope, and mind your purses, because that tent flap is older than your grandmother and lets the wind in. Sit down, sit down. I'll tell you about the Kraken Man, though he was never a Kraken and never much of a man, and I was there the night the lamps went out on Mablethorpe sands.

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He came up the slipway in a wet tweed coat with a skull under one arm, the way other men carry a loaf. Old Maud Penhallow sold him a pint and a bed for a shilling, and in return he gave her the skull, which had a seam of octopus across its brow where a bone should be. Every night after, the tentacles grew a little longer. You could hear them behind the velvet curtain, a wet sucking sound like a boot coming out of mud.

Maud's boy Eli thought it a lark. He fed the thing cockles from a tin and told the crowds it would count their coins. It counted them, right enough. Every penny dropped in the bowl came back out as ink, black and warm, dripping off the edge of the stage in long thin strings. Nobody liked to say it, but the ink ran down the field, and wherever it ran the grass went black.

On the last night, Eli reached in past the tentacles to fetch a dropped shilling, and the skull turned its head to look at him. Then it smiled, and the ink ran from its jaw like a broken tap. The Kraken Man was gone by morning, and so was the boy. What was left was a skull on the stage, grinning, with a line of black drops still running from its teeth and a shilling wedged between them, bright as the day it was minted.