Black and grey octopus tattoo with fine hatched shading wrapping over the hip and down the thigh of a person in dark blue underwear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tattoo across hip and thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus with curling tentacles covers the side of the hip and upper thigh. The linework is fine and detailed, with hatched shading giving the body and tentacles depth, and each sucker is drawn individually. The ink is entirely black and grey on pale skin, and the octopus fills most of the frame against a plain pale wall.

Thigh Octopus Tentacle Sucker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada, the Calliope has been eleven weeks out of Falmouth and the men are starting to talk to the sea as if it owed them money. Yesterday Mr Pryce hauled up a pot he swore held a lobster, and it turned out to be an octopus the size of a sea chest, grey as wet slate, with its arms wound round the bait like a fist round a coin. Cook wanted it for the pot. I asked for the chance to draw it first, because I have never seen one that did not look like it was thinking.

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I sat on the hatch cover with my pencil and counted suckers until the light went. There were hundreds on a single arm, each a small pale ring with a dark eye at its centre, and not one matched its neighbour. I drew the arm curling back on itself like a fern unrolling, then the mantle, which rippled and paled as the creature moved, so that by the end I was only drawing what it had just been, not what it was.

In the night it got out of the cask. Pryce found a wet trail across the galley floor and a single arm hanging over the rim of the water butt, reaching for the lamp. We never caught the rest of it. Cook swore it had gone over the side, though I noticed the scuttle was still bolted.

I have pinned the drawing above my bunk. Some mornings I think I can see the ring of suckers on the paper moving a little, the way the sea does when you stop looking straight at it. Write soon, and tell the boys the sea is no better behaved than they are.