Black and grey octopus tattoo with stippled shading wrapping around a flexed upper arm, with a white sleeve at the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tattoo on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus with curling tentacles and suckers wraps across the upper arm, its head and body sitting over the outer bicep. The linework is bold and clean, with stippled and hatched shading giving the body and suckers depth. Only black ink and grey tones are used, and the tattoo is photographed on a flexed arm against a white t-shirt sleeve.

Dotwork Upper arm Octopus Tentacle Sucker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mabel kept the bees at the bottom of the allotments, where the wall ran down to the canal. Every spring the octopus came up the drain from the basin and sat under her rhubarb, and every spring she gave it a bowl of skimmed milk and told it to mind the leeks.

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One year the milk ran short. The cows at Hollins Farm had gone dry after the frost, and Mabel had only the thin blue stuff from the shop. She set the bowl down anyway. The octopus looked at it a long while, then reached over the wall with one arm and pulled Tom Greaves's washing off the line, sheet and all, and dragged it back down the drain to make a nest.

Tom came round at dusk with a cudgel and a face like thunder. Mabel stood between him and the wall with her hands on her hips. "You'll not go down there," she said. "It took your sheet because you left it out in the rain three days running, and it has been patient about that." Tom grumbled, but he went home. The sheet came back up the drain the next morning, folded square, with a sucker print on each corner like a small blue stamp.

That was the year the leeks won at the show. Mabel never said what she fed the octopus after the milk went, and nobody asked her twice.