Pencil and ink drawing of an octopus with curling tentacles and teal splashes, shown as a tattoo design on tracing paper, with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tentacle tattoo design on tracing paper

Mixed · Flash

A drawn design of an octopus with its tentacles curling and wrapping around each other in a vertical composition. The linework is dark and fine, with grey shading giving the suckers and tentacles volume against the pale tracing paper. Loose teal splashes sit behind the tentacles, adding the only colour to an otherwise greyscale drawing.

Octopus Tentacle Sucker Splash

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step there, the one with the loose board. My grandmother used to say the sea keeps a count of everything that falls off this harbour wall, and she was right about the sea, if about nothing else. Sit closer. The old ones always told this part with the lamp turned low, so you'll have to make do with the fish smell.

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Long ago, before the ferry, there was a widow on Skerrow named Mairi Coll who mended creels for the boats. Every dawn she found the same thing caught in her mesh: a single grey arm, long as a rope, its underside ringed with pale suckers like coins. She never cut it free. She unpicked it slowly, the way you'd work a knot out of a child's hair, and carried it down to the shallows in a bucket of sea water.

The octopus that came for it was no bigger than a fishing float at first, then it grew with each tide. It wound its arms through the dock ladders and up the rope of the boathouse, and the teal water blew white around its head whenever the wind came from the west. The men wanted it gone. Mairi only said that a thing which returns each dawn has business it hasn't finished.

On the last morning the arms came up over the gunwale of her skiff, slow as a question, and wrapped her oar. She let them. Then she unwound the thing from her own wrist one sucker at a time, and it let her go, and the tide took the whole creature back out past the lighthouse rock. The creels stayed full for forty years. Mind your footing on the way up, now.