Ork Beastmaster with a Snarling Squig Arm — Print & Oil Painting

The beast has the better part. It is larger than its handler's head, painted in violent orange and blue-purple stripes against a canvas that is otherwise entirely green, and its mouth is open so wide that the teeth alone take more of the picture than the greenskin's whole face. Tendrils trail off the back of it. A chain runs down from underneath.

The Ork himself has been given the supporting role and appears to be enjoying it. He stands on a low mound at the centre, mouth open in the same shout, wearing a red and green cap and a dark coat, with the creature riding at his right shoulder exactly where the arm should be. In his other hand a long curved blade is held out level to the left, pale yellow and slightly bent.

The whole canvas sits at one temperature of green. Sick olive fog above, a green-black wreck cutting across the top right, a row of dark spikes standing in the middle distance, and a burst of orange sparks off to the right that only makes the green look greener. Along the bottom the fog turns yellow where something is burning underneath it.

Two things are staked into the mound behind him: a totem with a red winged idol at the top, a snarling face flanked by two curved blades and hung with a red tassel, and a green box on a shaft below that. Down at the right, much smaller, a second greenskin aims a weapon into the murk. A blue-clad body lies in the yellow at the bottom left.

The creature has a name and a place in the ecology. Squigs come out of the same fungal cycle that produces Orks themselves, which is why a greenskin camp can grow its own food, its own herding animals and its own attack beasts from the same ground, and why every squig looks like a mouth given the minimum equipment needed to reach one. This one is chained rather than fitted, whatever the title suggests, but it is sitting exactly where an arm would be. Part of our Warhammer 40.000 collection, beside a greenskin raising a power klaw overhead in a painted sketch and a gunner charging past a towering effigy.