A shaded red-brown octopus tattoo with grey outlines and suckers, wrapped across the side of a torso above the waistband of jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tattoo on the side ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

An octopus with its body near the top centre and its tentacles curling outwards and downwards across the skin. The linework is dark and the suckers are picked out in fine grey detail, with soft shading that gives the body volume. The ink is mainly warm red-brown with grey and black accents, and the design fills the frame against the side of the torso.

Realism Ribs Octopus Tentacle Sucker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marta kept a fish stall at the Wednesday market in Brynmouth, where the rain came sideways off the bay and the awnings sagged like wet sails. Every morning the same grey octopus came up the slipway steps, eight arms gripping the iron rails, and waited patiently beside her scales. It never asked for much. It paid in limpet shells and bright sea-glass, which she dropped into a tobacco tin on the sill of her van.

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Her brother Tom said it was a witch's familiar, or the soul of a drowned sailor who had never learned to keep still. Marta said it was hungry and it was polite, which was more than could be said for most of the buyers. One wet Wednesday she gave it the spoiled end of a cod, and it stayed under her awning until the market closed, its arms curled around the tent pole, drinking the drip off the canvas like a man sipping tea.

That winter the tide came up the lower lanes and took the stalls, the crates, and the van with its tin. Marta stood on the harbour wall in the rain and cried for the lot of it. In the morning she found the crates stacked on her doorstep, dry, and the octopus gone back under the slipway. Her tin sat on the top crate, full to the lid with sea-glass.

She never asked where it went at night. Every wet Wednesday since, a pale shell has been waiting on her step, and a rope of green and blue glass lies coiled on the slab where the scales used to be.