Colour tattoo of a blue octopus with a yellow eye and orange-tinged tentacles and suckers across an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue octopus wrapped around an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large blue octopus wraps its tentacles around the upper arm, with its head and yellow eye rising towards the shoulder. The suckers and tentacle edges are outlined in fine dark and orange-red lines, with soft blue shading that gives the body volume. A pale orange and peach glow sits behind the head, and the skin tones and black top are visible in the photograph.

Upper arm Octopus Tentacle Sucker Eye Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put that bucket down before you spill its water on my clean step, and mind your fingers. No, that's not a crab in there. That's Mrs Pengelly's octopus, come up in Tom Rowe's pot off the breakwater the week the herring went quiet, and she wouldn't have it sold to the hotel men from Penzance. She kept it in the old zinc bath behind the net loft for a fortnight, feeding it mussels off the slipway and talking to it like a lodger.

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Now the thing about an octopus, my lad, is it knows which way the tide is going better than the lifeboat men do. On the last night of the fortnight the wind backed round to the south and the bath started to rock, and Tom went down with a torch to see the lid was on. He said the creature had its arms up over the rim like a man climbing out of a window, and its eye, gold as a sovereign, was fixed on the harbour mouth. He tried to lift it back by one arm and it took his wrist and wound round it, cool as wet rope. It wasn't hurting him. It was only holding on, the way you'd hold a stranger's hand at a funeral.

So Mrs Pengelly came down in her nightdress and her wellingtons, and she didn't pull. She sat on the edge of the slipway and sang the one about the drowned boat that her mother used to sing, and one by one the suckers let go, pale rings lifting off Tom's skin like pennies off a counter. The octopus went over the wall with a sound like a wet sheet being shaken, and the water closed over it, blue going to black.

Tom had a ring of marks on his arm for a month after, and he swore on his mother's Bible that they were still warm when the tide turned. So if you're wanting a fish for your supper, Albert, you can have the mackerel. The bath's been scrubbed, and the octopus has the sea.