Black and grey dotwork octopus tattoo with curling tentacles wrapping across the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tattoo along the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus curls across the side of the ribs, with its head near the top left and tentacles sweeping down and around to the right. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading built from stippled dots on the body and tentacle suckers. The piece is entirely black and grey and sits centred on a pale background of skin.

Dotwork Ribs Octopus Tentacle Sucker Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fishermen dragged it up the causeway on a hurdle at the turn of the tide, and by the time the bell rang for Sext it had already lost the colour of the sea. Abbot Hugh sent for me because my hand was steady and my Latin was passable, and because, he said, I had once drawn a heron so faithfully that the heron complained. He wanted the creature for the herbal, every sucker counted and every arm set true, before the gulls had their way with it.

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I worked in the cold scriptorium with the shutters open to the wind. The ink was oak gall and the quill went dry often, so I learned to shade the way the old masters did, with a hundred small dots rather than a line. Each sucker was a ring of dots within a ring. Brother Oswin brought bread at none and said I was taking too long. The eight arms curled as though they were still deciding which way to go, and the great eye, when I came to it, looked back at me with an expression I did not care to meet for long.

On the third evening my wrist would not hold still, so I set the pen down and walked to the shore. The tide had come in while I worked, and the rocks below the wall were running with water. Something was moving in the shallow pool beneath the chapel steps. I knelt, and a dark arm lifted over the lip of the stone and tested the air, the way a novice tests the cold before he steps into the lauds. Then it slid back under the weed and was gone.

In the morning the drawing was finished, every sucker counted to the last. Abbot Hugh turned the vellum to the window and nodded, and I did not tell him that the ring of dots at the tip of the lowest arm was still wet. I have kept a copy of my own. It hangs above my bed, and each night I count the suckers again, and each night I come up one short.