Black and grey octopus tattoo with stippled dotwork on the head and fine-line tentacles, on the side of a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tattoo on the side of a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus is tattooed on the outer thigh, with its head near the hip and its tentacles curling down towards the knee. The head is filled with dots and stippled patches, while the tentacles use fine outlines and light shading with suckers drawn along them. The image is black and grey, and the thigh fills the frame against a plain pale wall.

Dotwork Fine line Thigh Octopus Tentacle Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marina Ballroom had one rule painted above the cloakroom: nobody leaves before the last waltz. Vic Gillow enforced it with his arms, which were long and had a way of finding your wrist wherever you were trying to slip off towards the doors. The regulars called him the Octopus, though never to his face, because on a Saturday he could keep four couples turning at once and still have a hand free to pull a stout.

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I played piano in the band that year, third from the left, and I was the one who noticed he never sat down. He arrived in March with a sea-chest and a cough that wouldn't quit, took the door job because it paid in cold pies, and never once went near the water. After close he sat on the bottom step of the stage with ink on his fingers and drew the same creature over and over on the backs of raffle tickets: a domed head spotted like a lampshade, and arms curling down to the boards in loops as neat as a clockmaker's springs.

In October the wind took the end of the pier and the wireless said the boats were still out. Vic didn't come in that Saturday. At midnight the windows showed a flat black sea, and we played the last waltz to rows of empty chairs. When I looked down, the raffle tickets had drifted across the floor, every one curled tight, every one drawn on, eight arms apiece reaching for a door nobody had opened.

At the cloakroom, the brass hooks were bare. Nobody had hung a coat on them since March.