Colour realism tattoo of an orange octopus wrapping a brass diving helmet against a teal underwater background, on the upper arm.

Octopus wrapped around a vintage diving helmet

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

An orange octopus with a green eye curls its tentacles around a brass vintage diving helmet with a dark porthole window. The background is teal water with rising bubbles and dark tentacles, and the shading gives the octopus and helmet a smooth, three-dimensional finish. The design fills the upper arm and shoulder, shown against a blue sleeveless top and a brick wall.

Realism Upper arm Octopus Underwater Tentacle Bubble

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea came through the roof of the Greave Drift on a Tuesday, and by Thursday my father had stopped saying the men would walk up on their own. Nobody in Ashgate Row argued with him. We stood at the pithead in our coats while the pumps coughed and gave up, and the only thing that moved in the black water was a rope going slack and tight, slack and tight, as if someone below was tugging it to be sure we were still listening.

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It was old Dolly Pratt who said the thing about the octopus. She had washed pit clothes for forty years and claimed that any drift running under the sea would sooner or later be visited by whatever lived out there. It would come up the air pipe, she said, and sit on the helmet like a hen on eggs. Nobody believed her, least of all me, until Uncle Joe's brass diving helmet came out of the lamp room, scrubbed bright, its round glass dark as a well, and my father looked across the yard at me and said, you're the lightest.

I went down on the rope with the air hose hissing in my ears. Bubbles kept climbing past my face as if they were late for something. Lower, the light turned green and then gold, and the tunnel walls were furred with weed. I found Tom's lamp first, still burning. Then the tentacles came out of the dark, orange as rust, and folded round the helmet with a slow, patient grip that rang through the brass. A green eye turned to look at me through the porthole. It did not hurt me. It only held on, the way you hold a child's hand at a kerb.

They brought Tom up at first light, cold and blinking. He swears the octopus carried him to the foot of the ladder and set him down like a parcel. I have never told him I saw it let go of me first.