Black ink drawing of a human skull with octopus tentacles coiling over the cranium, jaw and sides of the face, shaded with fine hatching and stippling on a white background.

Skull wrapped in octopus tentacles

Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing human skull is wrapped in several octopus tentacles, with suckers drawn along each arm and curled tips at the top and bottom of the design. The skull is rendered with fine pen hatching and stippled shading that gives the bone volume, while the tentacles are detailed with rows of suckers. The drawing is in black ink on a plain white background, centred on the skull.

Skull Octopus Tentacle Sucker Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night porter at Fenner Quay has one rule: never lift the lid of the big tank after the lamps go off. You break it anyway. The fish are quiet, the cold room hums, and somebody has to check the seawater pump before the three o'clock lorry backs in and blocks the gate with its reversing bleep.

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That night the tank holds no cod, only grey gravel and a human skull, yellowed and grinning at the bottom as if it had been waiting for a tide. Something has wrapped itself round it. Arms as thick as fire hose thread through the eye sockets and fold over the brow, and every sucker is open, pale as coins, watching you from the water.

Dorrie, who worked this shift before you, told you once that the skull came up in a trawl net the winter the harbour froze. The octopus took it from the deckhands that same night and has kept it since, passing the seasons behind the glass like a widow with a pocket watch. She said it never hurt anyone. It only counts the people who come close.

You count too, out of habit: eight arms, a dozen suckers on the nearest, and the tip lifts from the gravel to tap the glass twice, neat as a clerk stamping a ticket. At three the lorry sounds its horn. You leave the lid up, pull your sleeve down over the cold, and go to open the gate, with the odd feeling that you have been counted as well.