Black and grey realistic octopus tattoo with curling tentacles across the back of a hand, shown in a close photograph.

Octopus tattoo on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus with a textured head and curling tentacles covers the back of a hand, extending from the knuckles towards the wrist and fingers. The body and tentacles are built from fine stippled and shaded linework that gives them depth and a three-dimensional look. The image is in black and grey against a pale skin tone, with a soft beige background and dark clothing at the edge of the frame.

Realism Dotwork Hand Octopus Tentacle Sea creature Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys Penhallow had gutted mackerel on the Newlyn slipway for thirty-one years and never once been surprised by what came up in a pot. Then the creel hauled on a wet Tuesday in February held one octopus, grey as harbour slate, its mantle puckered like an old glove. It took her wrist in a cold grip before she could reach for the knife.

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She did not kill it. She carried the bucket up the hill to the fish cellar where her brother Jory kept his nets, filled a tin bath with seawater from the wall, and sat on an upturned crate while the thing moved from corner to corner, tasting the air with its suckers. Jory said it wanted to go back past the breakwater. Dilys said the tide was wrong. They argued for three days over a pot of tea that went cold, and on the third morning the octopus had climbed the bath rim and lay along the sill of the cellar window, one arm curled round their father's brass key, the one for the boathouse that had been lost since the funeral.

She let it keep the key. At low water on the Friday she took the bath down to the slipway and tipped it over the stones, and the creature went into the weed like ink into milk. Nobody in the Ship believed her when she told it. They wanted the storm, or the drowned boat.

On Saturday she went down early. The key lay on the bottom step, wrapped in a neat coil of bladderwrack, the boathouse lock still stiff with salt. Beside it, pressed into the wet granite, was a ring of small round marks, each one a little deeper than the last, as if something had stood there a long while deciding whether to leave.