Colour neo-traditional tattoo of an octopus with blue and yellow tentacles curling over a woman's left shoulder and upper arm, seen from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tentacles across a shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A woman's back and shoulder show an octopus tattoo, with blue and yellow tentacles curling across the shoulder blade and down over the upper arm. The tentacles have bold dark outlines, shaded blue bodies, yellow patterned suckers and pink undersides, with teal shapes at the top of the shoulder. The subject fills the frame against a plain black background, with the tattoo as the clear focus.

Neo-trad Shoulder Octopus Tentacle Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ioanna, the octopus you asked about is not dead, though the boy who lifted it from the rocks below the harbour says it nearly took his thumb. I have it in the wash-pit under a sack, and it has been squirting ink at the wall all morning, a blue cloud that the sun turns the colour of your mother's dye jars. Do not tell Father I kept it. He would say a potter should bring nothing into the workshop but clay.

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But I have been thinking about the eight arms since the boat came in. Every one of them curls back on itself, as though it is trying to read its own length. Mine run round the rim of the bowl the same way, and the yellow spots I paint on the suckers are the hardest thing I have ever done with a brush. Pappas says I am wasting good slip. Perhaps I am. Yet when I finished the last jar and stood back, the arms seemed to shift in the lamplight, as if they meant to lift the jar off the table and carry it down to the water.

I will bring the bowl myself at the festival, wrapped in wool. Keep the cloth dry. If the creature is still alive when I arrive, I will let it go off the end of the quay where the rocks drop away, and you can tell me it was a bad bargain for the fishermen.