Three arms shown side by side, each with a black and grey octopus and squid sleeve in a dotwork engraved style, running from the upper arm to the forearm.

Octopus and squid sleeve across three arms

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Three arms are shown side by side against a dark background, each covered by a full sleeve of a large octopus and squid design. The linework is fine and engraved-looking, with cross-hatching and stippled dotwork shading that builds up the bodies, fins and curling tentacles with suckers. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey tones, and the tentacles wrap around the forearm and upper arm, with a dark tribal-style line visible near one shoulder.

Dotwork Upper arm Forearm Octopus Tentacle Sucker Sea creature Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The squid came in on the spring tide, the way the old ones always did, and it lay across the slipway at Carrick Head with its fins spread like a wet coat hung out to dry. My father said it had been driven into the shallows by the storm and would die there by morning. He was wrong about that, as he was about most things that weren't written in the logbook.

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It did not die. It lay there three days while the gulls wouldn't come near it, and on the fourth morning I went down with a bucket and found the tentacles had moved in the night. They had wound themselves around the iron bollards, and the hatched pattern of its skin had shifted from grey to a deep bruised black, the colour of the lamp-room glass before the sun gets to it. When I looked closer, every sucker on every arm was a small ring of light, and each one was looking at me.

I told my father. He climbed down with the lantern and stood a long time. Then he took the iron key from his belt and unlocked the lighthouse gate that had not been opened since my mother went out in the boat, and he said, quietly, that a creature which had come ashore to find a light should be given one. We carried it up to the gallery between us, though it weighed more than a whole sack of coal, and we set it on the iron rail where the beam swept over the water.

In the morning the rail was bare. There was only a wet trail down the steps and, on the lowest stone, one sucker the size of a coin, still warm, glowing faintly as the dawn came up grey over the sea.