Black fine line octopus tattoo with hatched shading across a person's shoulder and upper back.

Octopus tattoo across a shoulder and upper back

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus is drawn in black linework across the shoulder blade and upper back, with its head angled towards the top of the shoulder and its tentacles curling down and around the arm. The lines are fine and uniform, with hatched and stippled shading on the head and tentacles, and small circular suckers along the arms. The tattoo is shown in black ink on pale skin against a dark background.

Fine line Shoulder Back Octopus Tentacle Sucker Eye Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you look at me like that, Ada Marl. I was on the slipway the night Tom Pell went out after his father's pots, and the tide was making fast, and the water round the harbour wall had gone the colour of old pewter. He had his arm down past the elbow in a crab creel when something came up beside him, slow as a bishop, and laid its arms over the gunwale as if it owned the boat.

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It had a head the size of a church bell and two eyes like cartwheels, and it did not want Tom. It wanted the lantern. Tom's father had left it on the thwart beside his tobacco tin and a little brass compass that had never once pointed north. The creature took the compass in the very tip of one arm, turned it over as neatly as a tailor, and held it up to the lamp so the light came through the dial. Then it looked at Tom for the length of a long breath, and I swear to you it winked.

Tom said nothing, because nothing was the only thing his mother had ever taught him to say to the sea. The creature set the compass down on the wet stones at his feet, and the suckers on its arms pressed their little rings into the slate like a row of coins. Then it slid back under the wall, its last curl trailing after it the way a dog tucks in its tail.

Next morning the compass was gone from the stones and the tide had scrubbed the rings clean away. But Tom's father came home with a full catch and a needle that finally swung true, and Tom never again put his hand into anything he could not see the bottom of. Ask him yourself if you think I am lying. He will show you the pale rings still faint on his wrist, and he will tell you it was a kindness, and he will not say whose.