Black and grey dotwork octopus tattoo with curling tentacles on the side of a torso, below a raised arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus on the side of the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus is tattooed on the side of the torso, with its body near the ribs and tentacles curling across the skin towards the front and back. The design is built from fine stippled dots and clean outlines, giving the body and suckers soft tonal shading. The image is in black and grey and is framed close to the body against a dark wall.

Dotwork Ribs Octopus Tentacle

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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

Pull your chairs nearer the fire, for the snow has shut the road and nobody leaves before Thursday. Mind the kettle, Tam. Right, you want the one about the jar on the windowsill, the one old Mr Pell never let anyone touch. He bought it off a Leith chandler in the hard winter of 'sixty-one, a squat glass jar with a brass lid and a grey octopus folded up inside like a wet glove. It had come up in a herring net, and the chandler swore it had been eating the net for a week.

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Pell named her Mrs Odell, because she counted the lamps every night before the house went to bed. She learned the latch on the larder inside a fortnight. Tins of biscuits went missing, then the tongue from the Sunday joint, and once a whole boiled egg, shell and all, which she left arranged on the bottom stair like a dare. Pell said she was the only lodger who never paid and never complained.

One morning the lid was lying on the flagstones and the jar was empty. Wet suckers marked a path down the stairs, across the snow in the yard, and out to the harbour where the ice had broken open in black lanes. Pell went after her in his nightshirt and his boots. He found her wound round the mooring post of a dinghy, one arm holding a bundle of his wife's old letters, which she had clearly decided were hers to keep.

He never had the heart to fetch her back. Every winter since, the landlord has left a saucer of cold mackerel on that sill. By morning it's gone, and the frost on the glass is printed with ten small rings, all the way from the window to the door.