Pastel watercolour-style drawing of an octopus with curling tentacles and two pink fish on its head, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pastel octopus with fish and bubbles

Colour · Flash

A large octopus curls its tentacles around the frame, with its head decorated by two pink fish and small bubbles rising around it. The linework is dark and defined, with stippled texture on the head and suckers along the arms. Soft shades of blue, purple, pink and teal wash across the body, set against a plain white background.

Octopus Tentacle Fish Bubble Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had been told the octopus was a nuisance, the sort of creature that unscrewed jam jars and drained the water butt, so when she found it wedged under the rhubarb at six in the morning she considered calling Mr Pryce from the harbour office. Instead she sat on an upturned crate and watched it. Its skin kept changing, blue to violet to a pinkish grey, as if it were trying on colours for a party it had not been invited to.

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The garden sat at the top of Coldharbour Lane, a walled plot that dropped in terraces toward the sea wall. Her grandfather had built the lily pond at the bottom and filled it with water carried up in buckets, and nobody had ever explained how two pink fish had come to live in it, or why they swam in slow circles above the octopus whenever it rested. Ada fed the fish each morning. This morning she fed the octopus too, a cracked mussel from the bait tin, and it took the shell with a neat, almost polite reach of one arm.

By noon the creature had grown restless. It pulled itself along the path, arms looping over the lavender and leaving dark wet prints on the flagstones, and it stopped at the gate where the lane met the shingle. Ada followed, carrying the bucket she used for weeds. She thought of the tide tables pinned in the shed, and of her grandfather's habit of talking to the sea as if it owed him money.

At the wall it paused, lifted one arm, and laid it flat on the stone as if testing the warmth. Then, with a slow ripple of colour from teal to rose, it let go of the garden and slid down into the grey water below. Ada stood with the empty bucket in her hands, and the two pink fish, which had followed them all the way down the terrace, turned once in the shallows and went back home.