Small blue and black octopus tattoo with curling tentacles on skin, with a silver coin held beside it for scale.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue octopus tattoo beside a coin

Colour · Photo

A small octopus with curling tentacles is outlined in black and filled with blue ink, with blue dots scattered across the body and limbs. The linework is even and fairly bold, and the colour is applied in flat blue with a few lighter areas. A silver coin held between fingers on the right shows the scale, and the body area is not clearly identifiable.

Octopus Tentacle Dot Coin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The harbour clerk of Vellmere counts your coins twice, once for the king and once for the sea, and the sea is always the one that complains. You have been sent down to the Lantern Steps with a purse that clinks too lightly, because the tide tax falls due at the new moon and your father has drunk his share again.

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At the bottom of the steps the water is the colour of old slate, and the octopus is waiting on the third stair. Her name is Mother Inkle, though nobody in Vellmere says it to her face. She has eight arms, and each one curls the way a fern uncurls, slow and certain, and where she touches the stone her blue spots flare like lamps. She takes the coin you offer, turns it between two tentacle tips, and holds it up to the lantern so you can see the king's profile wearing its tiny crown.

"Light," she says. "Your father's debt is heavier than this, and you know whose door it will land at."

You expect her to ask for the purse. Instead she unrolls one arm across the step and lays something on it: a tidy row of pearls, each one dotted with blue, each one the size of a thumbnail. "Take these to the chandler on Gull Row. He will not ask where they came from. Pay the tide, keep the rest, and never come down these steps again unless you bring a stranger's coin."

You climb back into the wind with the pearls warm in your fist. By morning the tide has swallowed the lower stairs, and the harbour clerk, counting twice, finds the king's coin sitting on the lintel of his own door.