Colour tattoo of a red and green octopus with seaweed above it, in neo-traditional style, across the side of a torso and hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Octopus wrapping the side and hip

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large octopus with a red body, orange spots and pale green suckers wraps across the side of the torso and down towards the hip. Above it, orange and green seaweed or coral and a fish-like shape fill the upper ribs. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour sit alongside dotted detail on the suckers and body.

Neo-trad Ribs Thigh Octopus Tentacle Seaweed Coral Sucker Fish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass that coal scuttle over, Mabel, and mind the draught from the back door, because this is the one about Mrs Ferris and the octopus that came up the drainpipe at Seacombe House the winter of the big tide. You won't believe a word of it, but then you never believe me before supper.

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Mrs Ferris kept four lodgers that year. There was a retired purser with a wooden leg, two sisters who sold painted shells on the front, and a clerk who paid his rent in pennies counted out on the hall table. Every morning the loaf went missing from the larder, and a trail of wet green dots crossed the scullery tiles like someone had spilt a box of pearl buttons. She set a trap of salted herring. By breakfast the herring were gone and the tiles were glossy with ink.

So she sat up one night in her late husband's chair with the poker across her knees and the paraffin lamp turned low. Around two, the tide came up the drain with a hiss, and something red, freckled with orange lamps, slid over the sill. It had an eye like a fried egg, and it looked at her the way the rent man looks at a late payer. It didn't want the bread. It wanted the carved frame above the stairs, the one with the coral and the little painted fish that her husband had brought home from the Azores before he went down with the trawler.

She gave it the frame. In the morning the octopus had gone back down the drain, the frame was propped on the step, and the herring were never touched again. The clerk still swears he saw a red shape wrap the banister like a mooring rope. Now pour yourself a drop of that, and let's have the kettle on.