Full back tattoo of a realistic orange octopus among coral and seaweed in teal underwater tones, shown on a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus and coral underwater scene across a back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A large realistic octopus dominates a full-back tattoo, with its mantle and tentacles curling across the skin. Fine stippling and smooth shading give the skin texture and volume, and coral, seaweed and a pink anemone-like form fill the surrounding sea floor. The palette is mainly orange, teal and green, with deep blue water behind the scene.

Realism Back Octopus Tentacle Coral Seaweed Underwater Anemone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The octopus had been robbing my father's crab pots for a fortnight before anyone thought to blame it, and by then it knew the latch on the bait box better than he did. He swore at gulls and at the Hendra boys and at the weather, but he never once swore at the sea, which was how I knew he was frightened of getting old on a boat with nothing in the pots.

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I went down the slipway at low water with a torch and a mackerel wrapped in newspaper. Under the weed and the orange sponge that grew over the stones like spilt marmalade, there was a hollow the size of a bread oven, and in it a mantle the colour of rust that went teal as I watched, then green, then mottled like the wet rock itself. One eye considered me. I put the fish on a flat stone and stepped back, which felt like the sensible thing to do with a creature that could open a tin lid with its arms.

It took the mackerel and left the pots alone after that. Mrs Tregear next door said it was an omen. My father said it was thieving with better manners. I said nothing, because I had started going down most evenings with the torch, and the thing would lift a single arm above the water to greet me, pale at the tip, like someone hailing a bus.

When he died in the spring the pots went to the scrap man, and I kept the bait box. Last August I went down to the slipway at dusk and found the hollow empty except for a scatter of shell fragments and one pink anemone pulled loose from its rock, laid out on the stone as neatly as a letter.