Japanese style full sleeve tattoo of a purple octopus with pink suckers and grey waves across the shoulder and upper arm, with a green anchor near the lower arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus and waves full sleeve

Japanese · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an octopus with long purple tentacles covered in pink suckers and yellow dots, wrapping over the shoulder and down the arm. Grey and black shaded waves with white highlights fill the background, and a green anchor sits near the lower arm. The triptych photo shows the front, side and back of the arm, with the colour ink stronger on the tentacles than on the grey water.

Japanese Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Octopus Tentacle Wave Anchor 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

Don't look at me like that, Kit. I'm telling it straight. The Mary Ellen was three days out of Ardrossan when the sea turned the colour of wet slate and began to climb. Our skipper, a Dorset man called Pruett, ordered the anchor dropped in the lee of the Mull, and it bit something that wasn't rock.

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We hauled. The chain came up wound three times round an arm as purple as a bruise, the suckers on it pink as boiled prawns and dotted with yellow, each one the size of a farthing. Young Sam held the lantern and swore he saw an eye open in the water, slow and amber, and then the whole creature lifted its head over the rail like a grandmother checking who had come into her kitchen. Nobody spoke. The waves were standing up around us taller than the mainmast.

It didn't tear us apart. I'd have sworn it could have. Instead it unwound that chain one loop at a time, as careful as a woman picking a knot out of a child's hair, and when the last link slid free it laid the anchor on the deck, gently, the way you'd set down a teacup. Then it went over the side and the squall simply stopped, as if someone had closed a door.

We found the anchor in the morning, scrubbed clean, with a ring of small round marks pressed into its green shank. Pruett wrote in the log that the chain had parted in the storm. Nobody argued with him. Some nights I still hear something knocking on the hull, polite as a neighbour asking for sugar. Pass the jug, would you?