Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Octopus tattoo on a thigh
Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo
A large octopus with its head turned to the right and its tentacles curling across the outer thigh. The linework is fine and the body is built up with dense stippling and dot shading, with suckers drawn along each tentacle. The image is in black and grey against warm skin, with a green sofa and a striped top in the background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Brother Edmund had been told twice that the margins of the Psalter were for saints and vine scrolls, not for the creatures that came in on the tide. He kept his head bent anyway, dipping the fine nib and setting down one dot after another, the way the old master of the scriptorium had taught him to build a shadow without a single hard line.
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The octopus took shape on the vellum over three weeks of evenings. Its mantle rose from the page like a bell of smoke, and its arms wound out past the edge of the initial D, each sucker a small pale hollow he left unshaded so the candlelight could sit in it. Prior Gwilym came by each night at compline with his lamp, looked for a long moment, said nothing, and went on down the cold stair.
On the last night the wind came off the sands and rattled the shutters. Edmund found that his dark dots had gathered toward the head, and that the eye he had drawn was not looking at the reader at all but out through the window toward the causeway, where Tomas Penhale's boat had not come home since Lent. He did not scrape it away. He sat with the lamp guttering and the ink drying, and in the morning he signed his name in the smallest hand he owned, beneath the tentacle that curled furthest toward the sea.
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