Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tattoo on the back of a hand

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey octopus sits on the back of a hand, with its head near the wrist and its tentacles curling across the knuckles and down onto the fingers. The linework is fine and the shading is built from dense stippled dots, giving the body a textured, shadowed look. The image is a close, slightly angled shot against a plain light background, with the hand as the clear focus.

Dotwork Hand Octopus Tentacle Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Gull and Lantern road by noon, and by dusk the only thing moving in the taproom was the octopus in the tank behind the bar. Mrs Ruddock swore she had named him Desmond after a fishmonger in Whitby who owed her money, though nobody believed her. With the carrier cart stuck in a drift outside Scarborough, he had been fed on the last of the mussels, and he pressed against the glass in slow, ink-dark pulses, reading every face that came near.

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On the second night a stranger stamped in from the yard, a surveyor with a leather case and frost caught in his moustache. He wanted a room and a bowl of broth, and got neither until he had explained himself. The Board had sent him to measure the old lighthouse path before the spring floods took it. He talked for an hour about tides and benchmarks, and all the while Desmond watched him, eight arms spread flat against the glass like a man warming his palms at a fire.

I thought nothing of it until I came down before dawn and found the tank lid lifted an inch and a line of wet prints crossing the flagstones. They led to the surveyor's case, which lay open on the settle. Inside, the Board's soundings had been folded and unfolded so often the paper had gone soft as cloth, and on top of them sat Desmond, curled tight as a fist, a ring of suckers printed across the margin of every chart.

The road was ploughed by ten. The surveyor paid for his broth, shouldered his case without opening it, and drove off towards the coast. Mrs Ruddock says Desmond sulked for a week afterwards, pressed to the back of the tank. I suspect he had simply chosen which lines of the coast he meant to keep.