Colour tattoo of a blue octopus with pink cherry blossoms and petals, in a neo-traditional style, on the lower leg.

Blue octopus with cherry blossom on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A blue octopus with yellow eyes curls across the leg, its tentacles wrapping around and outlining the body with pink dotted suckers. Pink cherry blossom flowers and falling petals surround it. The shading is soft and smooth, with lighter highlights on the head and body, and the dark outlines give the design a bold edge.

Neo-trad Botanical Calf Octopus Cherry blossom Petal Tentacle Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

...and that is why the cherry trees lean against the seaward wall, and why no child in Carrick Hollow throws a stone into the moat after dark. Sit closer to the fire. The wind off the cliffs takes half of what I say, and the other half you will have to earn.

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The octopus was called Moll, and she lived in the flooded undercroft where the lord's wine had once been stored. Her skin was the blue of a clear winter sea, and when she was frightened she went pale as milk. Tobias, the steward's boy, fed her crabs from a bucket, and she paid him back with small bright things: a silver spoon, a child's button, the brass key of a chapel nobody had prayed in for forty years.

The lord's daughter, Ysolde, had little to do in that broken house but plant things. She pressed cherry stones into the cracks of the courtyard, and when the first blossom came, the petals drifted down the stairs and settled on the black water. Moll gathered them one by one, winding them around her arms like ribbon, until the cellar glowed pink in the lantern light. Then the spring storms came, the seaward wall split, and the lord sent men with carts to fill the undercroft with rubble.

Tobias begged Ysolde to stop them, but she only nodded and went down the cracked steps alone with a lantern. She sat on the wet stone and waited. Moll came up slow, paler than Ysolde had ever seen her, and laid one arm across her wrist like a bracelet. "Go on, then," Ysolde whispered, "the sea is open at the gate." The octopus unwound the petals one by one, set them on the tide, and slid out through the gap in the wall. Each April since, the water under the wall turns pink for a morning. If you see it, do not throw anything. That is only Moll, going home the long way.