Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey nautical full sleeve

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The sleeve shows an octopus with tentacles wrapping around the forearm, a skull lower down, and a ship's wheel and compass star near the wrist. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth grey wash with solid black areas. The four photographs show the sleeve from different angles against a plain background.

Traditional Forearm Upper arm Octopus Skull Ship wheel Sea Nautical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold that lantern steady, boy, for the old one doesn't come up for a man who is squinting. The Marguerite Vane was nine days out of Ilha Nova when the sea went flat and grey as slate, and the reef bell began to ring with nothing near it to ring.

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Tobias Ferro had the wheel that night, and he swore afterwards that the spokes turned on their own, slow as a clock hand, while the compass star on the binnacle kept pointing at the wrong corner of the dark. Then the arms came over the rail. One lifted the cook clean off the planks and set him down on the far side of the deck, politely, the way you'd set down a teacup. The bosun took a cleaver to the nearest tentacle. It curled around the mainmast and held on, and the mast groaned like an old wife.

Something knocked against the hull below the waterline, and the bosun went down with a rope and came up with a skull strung on wire, its jaw bound shut with tarred twine. It was the navigator Sorrell, lost off the Azores forty years before, and nobody had thought to tell the octopus. Ferro laughed until he cried, then took the skull in both hands and set it on the brass hub of the wheel, where it nodded at the stars as if it had been waiting.

We made port on the third morning with the wind behind us. The creature let the ship go at dawn, one arm at a time, and the last thing I saw was the sun rising through the spokes and the compass star finally finding north.