Black outlined octopus tattoo with swirl and dot patterning across the ribs and side of a torso, in a dotwork style.

Ornamental octopus on the side of the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus with bold black outlines and tentacles curling around the side of the torso. The body and tentacles are filled with spirals, concentric circles and dots, with some areas shaded in lighter greys and browns. The design fills the frame from the upper arm down to the waistband of jeans, with the octopus head near the centre.

Dotwork Ribs Octopus Tentacle Swirl Dot Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road out of Tarrow runs straight across the old lake bed for forty miles, and the salt lies white on either side like sugar somebody spilled and never swept up. Mrs Okonedo at the petrol halt sold me a clay jar this morning, the size of a bread bin, painted all over with spirals and rings of dots in ochre and rust. She said her grandmother made them from the mud of the lake when there was still water in it. I asked what the octopus on the lid was for. She said it was not an octopus at all but the lake's memory, and the eight arms were the eight roads that once met at the shore.

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I didn't believe her and bought it anyway, then tied it into the passenger seat with the belt. By noon the heat had the tarmac shivering into water, and every ridge of salt looked like a tentacle lifting and settling. When the wind came across the bed the jar gave off a low note, like a thumb drawn round a wet rim.

At the second junction the road split into eight pale tracks and I took one of them, I still don't know whether it was the right one. The jar was warm against my leg. I stopped, climbed out and set it down on the crust where the salt had dried into rings. Somewhere under the surface something ticked, then ticked again, and the ground around the jar rippled outward in a circle, as if it had been stirred from below.

I drove on without looking back. Tonight I'm writing this in a motel with a view of nothing but more road, and the jar sits on the windowsill with its lid off, the dots catching the lamplight. I have been counting the rings. There are eight arms, and I keep counting nine.