Colour tattoo of a green octopus with pink suckers among blue waves across a person's chest, in a traditional style, with tattooed arms visible at the sides.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green octopus and waves on chest

Traditional · Chest · Colour · Photo

A person holds open a black top to show a large colour tattoo of a green octopus across the chest. Its tentacles curl around pink suckers and sit among stylised blue waves and splashes. Bold outlines and flat colour fills give it a traditional feel, and tattooed arms are visible at the sides.

Traditional Chest Octopus Tentacle Wave Sea Sucker

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the candle, for it's older than my knees. Forty summers I pulled Vane's Marvels round the coast, and the only creature that ever paid its own way was the one in the copper tank behind the candyfloss. Mrs Gorrell, the fishwife of Pellow Bay, sold her to my father for a crate of pilchards and a promise. She had eight arms, three hearts and the temper of a wet cat.

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Every night she painted the glass with her arms, green as new sprouts, and every night she sulked when the lamps went out. She learned the bolts on the tank. She learned the cough of the generator and the particular whine of the ghost train's brakes. And she learned my father's pockets, which was the thing that cost him. One August she had the lid loose and was halfway down the drain by the time the cook found her, her suckers gripping the copper as if she'd been born to it, and the bay was not three hundred yards off.

The fair went north that autumn, and the tank went with it, though nobody could say the octopus was still in it. On our last night at Pellow Bay, my father opened the lid himself. He said nothing. He only tipped the water over the stones, and she went down the shingle like a spilt sack of ink, pink eyes turned back once toward the lamps.

Next morning Gorrell's boy found a row of small wet suckers pressed into the salt on the bow of his father's boat, neat as a signature. Mind your step on the boards going out. Some debts are paid in the sea, and the sea keeps a very good ledger.