Traditional-style tattoo on a forearm of a green octopus with yellow suckers wrapped around a grey anchor, with pink roses and blue flowers below.

Octopus wrapped around an anchor with roses

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A green octopus with yellow-ringed suckers wraps its tentacles around a shaded grey anchor, with a rope coiled along the shank. Pink roses and blue flowers with green leaves sit at the lower edge, and curling tentacles frame the anchor on the right. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft shading on the anchor and octopus and a pale, clean background behind the forearm.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Octopus Anchor Rope Tentacle Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The show had been losing its tent a pole at a time since the spring the Hartley Brothers sold the elephant. By August we were pitching on the rec at Margate, under canvas patched with bicycle inner tube, and the only creature still drawing a crowd was Mrs Pell, the octopus in the glass tank behind the ticket booth.

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Dad had won her off a fisherman in Ramsgate for a bottle of rum and a promise he never meant to keep. She had a habit of hauling herself up the anchor we kept in her tank, a rusted thing Grandad swore had come off the Medway ferry, and wrapping herself round it until only her yellow-ringed suckers showed. Customers paid a shilling to watch her drag the anchor a half inch across the gravel. Some days she did it for nothing, and nobody came to see that.

In September a letter arrived from a council man who wanted the rec for a car park. Dad read it at the breakfast table, folded it into quarters, and slid it under the sugar bowl. Mum had been dead two winters, and the roses she'd painted on the caravan door were peeling now too. I went out to the tank with a bucket of cockle water and told Mrs Pell what was coming.

On the last night she climbed the glass, slow as a clock hand, and took hold of the anchor with every arm she had. Dad lifted the lid to see if she was poorly. She didn't look poorly. She looked like someone who'd made up her mind. We never found the anchor after we packed up, nor the octopus, but the sign still hangs in Dad's kitchen: Mrs Pell's Marvels, with two pink roses painted in the corner where the paint ran out.