Colour tattoo of a purple and green octopus with curling tentacles on the upper arm and shoulder of a person holding a camera.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple and green octopus on shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large octopus with a purple body, dotted suckers and a yellow eye wraps across the upper arm and shoulder, with green tentacles curling down the arm. The bold outlines and rich, layered colour give it a rendered, illustrative look, and the tentacles fill the arm toward the elbow. The photograph is taken in a mirror with the wearer's face hidden behind a camera.

Neo-trad Shoulder Upper arm Octopus Tentacle Sea creature Sucker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pots came up light again that Tuesday, every one stripped clean to the cane, and Nan Trelease blamed the gulls off the breakwater until the sun dropped behind Mousehole. She knew better by then. Something was working her gear from underneath, patient as a seamstress, and it had a taste for the pilchards she kept back for the bass.

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She rowed out on the ebb with a hooded lantern and sat with the oars shipped until the surface went glassy. The octopus rose beneath the boat like a bruise coming up through milk. Its body was the deep plum of a bramble in October, freckled with pale rings, and when it turned its single gold eye on her it had the calm of a magistrate. Then an arm lifted over the gunwale, green as bottle glass, and set a flat grey stone on the thwart beside her, neatly, as if returning a borrowed cup.

'Fair enough,' she said. 'You've had my bait. What is it you want for it?' It wanted nothing she could name in words. It wanted her to leave off hauling at the mouth of the cove, where the old harbour wall had slid into the sea in the gale of 1891, because those broken stones were its front room and the small crabs were its neighbours' children. She agreed. For thirty winters she kept her lines low, left the wall alone, and the pilchards went where they were meant to go.

When her hands finally kept her ashore, she sent her grandson Joe out in her place with the same stone in his pocket and the same instructions. He came back grinning, his pots full of crab, and swore the water had opened a gold eye at him and shut it again like a shutter. Nan only nodded and went on mending nets by the stove. Each Tuesday she still set a pilchard on the windowsill, and each Wednesday the saucer was empty.