Black and grey tattoo of a woman in a billowing skirt with an octopus head and tentacles, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus-headed woman in a skirt on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A standing female figure in a full, flowing skirt has an octopus in place of her head, with its tentacles curling outward and upward around her. The design is rendered in black and grey with fine hatching, stippling and bold dark outlines, giving the skirt and tentacles strong tonal contrast. The tattoo sits vertically on a pale forearm against a dark, blurred background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The hem has eaten two days of my life and I am not sorry. Winifred wants the black silk to move the way water moves when a boat has just gone past, heavy at the bottom and lifting at the edges, so I have been pinning it to the dummy in the back room with my mouth full of pins and my temper on a short lead. She will not have it plain. She says a wedding is only a dance you agree to in front of witnesses, and she means to dance it with something holding her up.

You will remember the octopus in the glass tank behind the chandler's on Quay Street, the one that unscrewed the lid of the cockle jar while we were all looking the other way. Winifred has been feeding it crab shell since she was nine. Her father says she has more sense with it than with the Vicar. On Tuesday she brought me a sketch of herself in the skirt, arms gone, and wanted the top half worked in strands of thread: eight of them, sewn in grey and black, curling up from the waistband as if they were searching for a rail to grab.

The last fitting went wrong. When I took in the bodice she laughed and pulled something from the lining, a little pewter octopus no bigger than my thumbnail, the kind sold for brooches at the summer fair. She had stitched it into the seam herself. "So I'm not dancing alone," she said, and I had no answer to that except to let the hem down another half inch.

I'll bring the skirt on Saturday wrapped in brown paper. Burn this letter after, as you always tell me to. Your sister, Maud.

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