Colour tattoo of an orange octopus with grey suckers and a cross-eyed expression on a lower leg, in a traditional style.

Orange octopus on a lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A large orange octopus with yellow highlights and grey sucker detail curls across the skin, its head turned to one side with a half-closed eye. The bold black outlines and smooth colour shading give it a traditional look, and the design fills most of the frame. Partial green lettering or marks are visible along the right edge of the image.

Traditional Calf Octopus Tentacle Sucker Eye

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit you down, the both of you, and mind the cat on that chair. Myrtle Cribb kept the Anchorage on the front at Scarrow, twelve rooms and a dining room that smelled of boiled cabbage and wet oilskins, and in the summer of the big storm she had one lodger who paid in pennies and never once came down to breakfast.

Keep reading

He was an octopus, a great orange fellow out of the rock pools below the groyne, and he had taken the third-floor back because the window looked straight down onto the tide. Every morning Myrtle found the skirting boards wet and a sucker print on the bread bin. Every morning he had one eye half-shut, as though he knew a joke about the vicar and wasn't telling it.

The trouble started when the fishermen's wives said the lobster pots were coming up empty. Myrtle went up with a broom and a sharp word. She found him coiled round the bedpost, sucking on the brass knob, and he looked at her sideways, slow and sly, and she sat down on the bed because her knees had gone. 'Well,' she said, 'you can have the room till the first frost, and not one more crab.'

He kept his side of it. Each dawn the pots came up full, the best catches in the bay, and the wives said nothing about it in the shop. When the frost finally came, Myrtle opened the back window herself, and a grey tentacle tipped the sill like a salute, and the tide took him out past the groyne without a splash. She still sets a plate of herring at the third-floor door on Tuesdays, and nobody has ever asked her why.