Black and grey realism style octopus tattoo with curling tentacles spreading across a person's back and over the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tattoo across a back and shoulder

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus is tattooed across the upper back, with its head and body near the centre and tentacles curling outwards towards the shoulder and upper arm. The linework is fine and the body is built up with soft grey shading and stippled texture to suggest the skin's surface. The image is in black and grey ink and is framed from behind, with the subject's dark curly hair visible at the top.

Realism Back Upper arm Octopus Tentacle Sea creature

Find an artist for this

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

Mind the lamp, our Tom, and sit where the draught can't get at you. No, the other stool. Now. You want the one about the sea thing in Hollin Drift, and I'll tell it once, so listen with your ears and not your mouth.

Keep reading

In my grandmother's day the Drift ran three miles under the moor, and it ran into water nobody had meant to find. One wet Tuesday in 1911 a cutter called Amos Penrith broke through a wall of stone and his pick went into something soft and cold that pulled back. He didn't stop to see what it was. He came up the shaft with his lamp gone and his sleeve torn, and he swore on his wife's Bible that the thing had reached out of the dark and wound a length of itself round his wrist, and that it had looked at him the way a man looks at a dog he means to keep.

After that the men began to see it in the lamplight. Grey as wet slate, it would slide along the roof of the workings with its arms folded behind it, and where it passed the roof stopped dripping. Water that had drowned three men in '98 drew back from the cutting face like a tide going out. Nobody said it aloud at the surface, but every man who went down took a bit of coal from the day before and set it on the ledge by the water, for it was said the thing liked to be paid in black.

The Drift closed in 1936, and the water came back up the shaft within the year. On wet nights, if you go up past the old engine house and put your hand to the pump iron, you'll find it runs cold and tastes of salt. My grandmother said that was the sea remembering its debt. Your mother says it's the rain. Go on, get to bed, and leave the lamp burning.