Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an octopus with curling tentacles across the outer thigh.

Octopus tattoo on the thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus fills most of the frame, with its head turned towards the viewer and its tentacles curling out across the skin. The head is shaded with fine stippled dots and soft grey gradients, while the tentacles use bold black outlines with smooth, filled shading. The image is a close photo of the thigh against a pale, plain background, with the tattoo centred and well lit.

Dotwork Thigh Octopus Tentacle Sea creature Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gardener's wife had been digging the same bed for three days before she saw the marks, a row of pale rings pressed into the mud where the slope ran down to the rock pools. Nobody on Carrick Lane kept a garden that close to the sea, and nobody else would have cared about the mud. She knelt, put two fingers in one of the rings, and felt it give back the cold.

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Her husband said it was gulls, or the boy from the chapel who kept ferrets. He said so every evening over the tea, and every morning the marks had moved a little further up between the runner beans, round the water butt, past the shed where the seed potatoes were kept in sacks.

On the fourth night she sat up at the kitchen window with the lamp turned low. The moon came over the wall and laid its light on the lettuces, and out of the dark between the rows came a head the size of a washing copper, mottled all over with small white rounds like spilt pearls. It had eyes that looked at her the way the vicar looked at a hymn he did not care for. Arms came after it, one at a time, and each arm curled back on itself as it walked, feeling its way along the path toward the house.

She did not go out with a broom. She set a dish of bread and salt on the step, the way her mother had for things that came up from the water, and she said plainly that the beans were for the village and the lettuces were for the sick, and that it could have the rain barrel and the ditch and the bottom of the well.

In the morning the bread was gone and the path was wet. Along the line of the wall the rings went down toward the sea, and in the bed where she had planted the seed potatoes, every single one had been turned over and left in neat rows, as if someone had been counting.