Black and grey octopus tattoo with stippled shading on a bare stomach, sitting to the side of the navel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tattoo on the abdomen

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed black octopus sits on the lower abdomen, with its head near the centre and its tentacles curling outwards and downwards. The tentacles are rendered with fine linework and dense dot shading that gives the body texture and depth. The image is a black and white photograph against a dark background, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Dotwork Other 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 prior gave me the jar in October, when the tide had thrown a dead octopus onto the slipway below St Brannoc's and the fishermen would not touch it. It was the size of a man's head, pale as candle wax, and its arms had already begun to curl in on themselves the way bracken does in frost. Brother Thomas, who kept the library, said I had steady hands for copying. He was wrong about the hands, but right about the copying.

Keep reading

I drew it for nine days by the north window, with a quill cut for fine hair and a pot of lamp-black thinned with rainwater. Every sucker needed a dot, and every dot needed a decision about where the light fell. The engravings in the cabinet were all wrong in the same way: they gave the beast a dozen tidy ropes and no weight at all. I wanted the arms to look as though they had been dragged up through cold water, heavy and slow, feeling for something to hold.

On the ninth evening the bell for compline rang while the ink was still wet, and I stepped out into the cloister for a moment. When I came back the candle had guttered and the sheet lay in shadow. The longest arm seemed to have lifted from the page, its tip curled towards the open door as if it had been following the draught out to the sea. There was no wind. Brother Thomas found me kneeling there at dawn, counting the suckers again.

I never told him that I had dotted the tip only once. I had meant to go back and give it one more ring of shade, but I left it. The ledger records the sheet as finished, and I have not yet had the courage to finish it myself.