Black and grey realism tattoo of an octopus with curling tentacles across the upper arm and top of the shoulder.

Octopus tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus with its head centred and tentacles curling outwards and upwards fills the upper arm and reaches onto the top of the shoulder. The skin texture, suckers and tentacle folds are rendered with fine shading and strong contrast, giving a three-dimensional effect. The piece is entirely black and grey, set against a dark sleeve and a pale wall.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Octopus Tentacle Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had been out three hours when Brother Oswin found the octopus wedged beneath the weir, its arms already fading from brown to the grey of wet slate. He wanted it thrown back. I wanted to draw it before the light went, and since I was the one with the ink horn tucked in my belt, the argument was short.

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For six days I worked at the scriptorium desk with the shutters bolted against the wind, setting down each sucker as a small ring of ink and shading the pleats where the flesh folded over itself until my wrist ached. On the fourth evening Abbot Gerald stood behind me with his hands buried in his sleeves and said the Psalter was meant for the Office, not for the bottom of the sea. I told him the sea had been here first. He did not laugh, but he did not take the page either.

On the seventh morning the drawing was gone from my desk. In its place lay a damp print on the vellum, a ring of pale suckers pressed into the gutter, and the abbot's chair stood pushed back as though someone had risen from it in a hurry. The novices swore the creature had climbed the stairs in the night. I kept quiet, because I had laid the ink on its head so thickly that it had bled through to the next leaf, and I knew that a thing drawn that well does not stay flat on a page for long.

At vespers the chapel was dark except for one candle, and the great door stood open to the rising water. Gerald knelt at the altar with the Psalter open beside him, and around the lectern, very still and very patient, a grey arm curled to hold the place where he had been reading.