Blue-ink octopus tentacle tattoo spreading across a woman's chest and shoulder, worn beneath a black top and a cameo pendant necklace.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue octopus tentacles across a chest

Chest · Colour · Photo

A close crop of a woman's upper chest and shoulders shows large octopus tentacles rendered in blue ink, with curling suckers and swirling outlines spreading across the skin. The shading uses soft blue tones and fine linework, and the tentacles wrap towards the shoulder and under the neckline of a black top. A silver cameo pendant on a chain and several rings are also visible, while other tattoos are partly seen on the upper arm.

Chest Shoulder Octopus Tentacle Sucker Swirl Cameo Necklace Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide has turned by the time you tie the barge up below Brentford, and the cabin smells of paraffin and wet rope. Your brother's cameo still hangs from the hook by the stove, its little white face turned to the wall where he left it. You do not take it down. The thing that came up the Brent last spring has been returning every night since, its arms knocking against the hull like someone who has forgotten the way in.

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Nobody on the towpath believes you about the arms. Mrs Okafor from the boat moored behind yours laughs and says the river is only brown, and the lock-keeper blames eels. But you have seen the suckers pressed into the mud at dawn, a ring of them wide as a dinner plate, and you have seen the blue swirl beneath the lock gates where the water turns thick as ink.

On the last night of the month you carry the cameo to the bow, where the mooring line runs taut into the dark. You unclasp the chain and hold it out over the water the way your brother used to hold out his hand for the fare. The arms rise slowly. One of them curls round the line of your fingers, cool and deliberate, and it is not unkind. It only wants what he promised it, which was never a locket but someone who would keep coming back down to the water.

The cameo slides off your palm, and the river closes over it without a ripple, the way a hand closes over a coin it means to keep. In the morning the barge rides high and easy, and the blue beneath the hull is only the sky, lying flat and patient on the surface where you can no longer see anything else.