Ballpoint pens can write, but sometimes they spontaneously decide to dry out, or begin alternating between spitting out huge blotches of ink and nothing at all.

Fed up with such pens, artist Raymond Cicin’s designer friends began questioning their usefulness, suggesting that they may in fact be completely useless. But rather than agreeing and spiting his pens, Cicin took his friends’ words as a challenge to create a new kind of art.

He collected his friends’ discarded pens and set out to draw a mammoth octopus, spending more than a year on the masterfully drawn, highly-detailed piece.

The result?

“It was a demon I was psyched to finish and at times tormented to work on,” Cicin described his experience working on the piece. “It gave me a good beating in the battle of persistence.”

The octopus was inspired by German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who died in 1919. It is now a part of his ongoing Deep Blue series, and he continues to prove his friends (and everyone else who has thrown a “useless” pen in the trash) wrong by creating gorgeous artwork.

Now, we don’t have an excuse not to use our ballpoint pens.