Black and grey dotwork octopus tattoo with tentacles wrapping across the lower abdomen and hips.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tattoo across hips and abdomen

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus with a central head and curling tentacles covers the lower abdomen and hips, with tentacles extending down the thighs. The linework is bold and the head and tentacle suckers are built up with fine stippled dots and solid black shading. The ink is entirely black and grey against pale skin, and the design is centred on the midline of the body with a navel piercing visible above it.

Blackwork Dotwork Other Octopus Tentacle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, you'll want to sit down for this, because my grandmother told it standing, and she never sat for a story in her life. The Ballroom at Saltcombe Pier had a sprung floor and a bandstand painted the colour of mustard, and on Saturday nights the whole town came down in their good shoes. The year the herring failed, a dark shape came up under the boards at high tide and stayed there. Nobody saw it at first. They only felt the floor give, slow, like something breathing beneath the foxtrot.

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Old Tam Ferrier, who kept the lamps, swore he'd seen the thing through a knothole. Eight arms, he said, though he couldn't count them properly for the way they kept moving, and every one ended in a curl like a violin scroll. The band played on regardless. The bandleader, a thin man called Lennox with a moustache like a paintbrush, had a rule that nobody stopped dancing until the last waltz. So they danced, and the arms rose between the floorboards, feeling for ankles and finding only the rhythm.

Then came the turn. Lennox's daughter Edie, who had no patience for rules, took off her shoes, walked to the edge of the boards and laid her palm on the nearest tentacle as if greeting a dog. It was cold as a pump handle and strong as the tide. It did not pull her under. It lifted her, gently, the way you'd lift a dropped glove, and set her back on the dance floor with the music still going.

The creature went down with the ebb and never returned. Edie kept her shoes off for the rest of the season, and on the last night of summer she told the hall the octopus had only wanted a partner who knew the steps. Nobody believed her, of course. But the floor was never quite level again, and I have never heard a waltz played in that hall without somebody glancing down.