Colour tattoo of a blue-ringed octopus with orange eye and tentacles curling beside pink roses and green leaves, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue-ringed octopus and roses on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A blue-ringed octopus with a dark blue head, pale blue spots and an orange eye fills the top of the forearm, with its tentacles curling down and to the right. Pink roses with green leaves sit behind the head, and the shading is soft and realistic. Colour ink dominates the design against plain pale skin and a light background.

Realism Botanical Forearm Octopus Tentacle Rose Leaves Flower

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marnie had been told never to pick things up off the shingle below Penhale farm in January, but the tide had left a grey lump in the dip of the rock, and when she crouched its rings lit up electric blue, a dozen pale circles across its head, the way the milking parlour bulb flickered before it gave out. Her grandfather had always said the blue-ringed ones were the deadly kind. He had also said a great many things about the sea that turned out to be wrong.

Keep reading

She fetched the bucket with the cracked handle from the barn and lowered the octopus into a skin of seawater. It pressed itself against the enamel and lifted one arm over the rim like a question. Behind her the frost was thick on the greenhouse glass, and her gran's pink climber, which had never been expected to survive a Cornish winter, had three buds open at the top of the wall. Marnie had cut two of them yesterday for the kitchen table, and nobody had said a word about it.

Stew Ellery came up the lane at noon with the feed lorry and stood at the gate turning his cap in his hands. "You'll have to let that go," he said. "Rings like that don't mean friendly." Marnie agreed. She carried the bucket past the hens, down the field to the pool where the water ran clear over the stones. The octopus unpeeled itself from the enamel one arm at a time, curling its last tentacle round her wrist before it let go, and the rings on its head went dark as it slid beneath a ledge.

In March the climber flowered properly, all of it at once, and Marnie cut a stem to take down to the pool, though she could not have said why. The water was still. Somewhere under the weed a small blue light blinked once, and she laid the petals on the surface and watched them drift out on the current.