Black and grey realistic octopus tattoo with curling tentacles across the outer thigh and hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tattoo on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus is tattooed on the outer thigh and hip, with its body near the top and tentacles curling down and around the leg. The shading is soft and greyscale, with fine suckers and tonal gradation along the tentacles. The photograph is black and white and shows the person from the hip down to the knee, wearing shorts and a light top.

Realism Thigh Octopus Tentacle Sea creature

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Marlow Ballroom had played the same waltz four times since eight, and Mavis Coyle counted every bar from the cloakroom hatch. Behind her, in the scullery where the fishmonger's boy kept the catch on ice, something knocked against the side of a tin bath. Her brother Teddy had hauled the octopus up from Gull Rock that morning, a grey-brown thing as big as a hat, and promised the manager it would be gone by the interval. Nobody had thought to ask what an octopus wanted.

Keep reading

At half past nine the knocking stopped. Mavis went through with a torch and found the bath empty, the lid askew, and a wet trail across the flags that ended at the back door, propped open with a brick. Outside, the harbour lamps slid on the swell. She followed the marks down the slipway, past the tar barrels, and found the creature already halfway across the wet sand, one arm lifted as if reaching for a partner's hand.

Behind her the ballroom doors swung open and the last waltz spilled out in a yellow wash of light, couples turning in the doorway. Teddy would have shouted. Mavis knelt instead and held out her wrist, and the octopus curled around it, cool and gentle, its suckers tapping out the time. They turned together at the edge of the tide, slow and clumsy, until the band played its final chord and the lamps along the front went out one by one.

By morning the manager had found a curve of dried prints across the ballroom floor, leading from the cloakroom to the bandstand and back again. Mavis, stiff-handed from the night's cold, said nothing about it. She only watched the tide come in over the sand where the octopus had gone, and wondered whether it had learned the steps from her or she from it.