Black and grey shaded octopus tentacles tattoo on the outer thigh of a person in dark underwear, with pink curtains behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus tentacles tattoo on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an octopus with curling tentacles wrapping around the outer thigh, with suckers drawn along each arm. It is rendered in black linework with grey shading that gives the tentacles volume. The photograph is taken at close range, with both thighs and a pink curtain in the background.

Thigh Octopus Tentacle Sucker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The octopus had been in the trawl for two hours before anyone noticed it was still alive. Ruth Dunmore found it in the lazarette of the Marigold Tern, three hundred miles west of Finisterre, its arms sprawled across a crate of tinned peaches as if it had come aboard to take stock.

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Bosun Harry Tulloch wanted it in the pot by supper. Ruth told him the galley was hers and so was the decision, and she carried the creature up the companionway in a bucket of sea water while it wound one arm round her wrist. The suckers pulled at her skin like a row of small, patient mouths. Harry muttered about bad luck and went back to the winch.

At the rail she tipped the bucket and the octopus hesitated on the cap rail, mottled grey, reading the wind. Then it looked back along the deck towards the lazarette hatch, as though it had left something unfinished, and went down the side hand over hand on the mooring line until the swell took it.

In the morning Harry found one tin of peaches missing from the crate. On the dusty lid of the next tin there was a neat ring of pale prints, eight of them, pressed in a careful curl. Ruth wrote in the log that the stowaway had paid its passage, and that the peaches were, on balance, a fair price.