Purple octopus tattoo with green suckers and a yellow eye, wrapping across the upper arm in a neo-traditional style.

Purple octopus on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A purple octopus with curling tentacles spreads across the upper arm, with its yellow eye near the centre. The tentacles are edged in dark outline and shaded in purple tones, and green dots mark the suckers along their length. The design sits against bare skin on a light sheet, with the tentacles trailing off towards the right.

Neo-trad Upper arm Octopus Tentacle Eye Sucker Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the gull on the bollard, he's been listening since breakfast. You want the one about Mrs Gurney's lodger? No? Then you'll have the octopus, because that's the story Hallowell harbour has always had, and I'll tell it the way my grandfather told it to me, with his pipe going out every third sentence.

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Down past the slipway, where the weed hangs like wet washing, there lived a purple octopus the fishwives called Ottoline, though nobody agreed who had named her. She was the colour of plums left too long on the sill, and every one of her arms had a row of green beads along it, which the old men swore were the sweets she'd pinched from the chandler's jar. Her eye was amber as a boiled sweet held up to the sun, and it missed nothing, least of all the lamp that Tobias Crane carried down the steps each night to see the mooring lines were fast.

Tobias was a careful man and a poor sleeper. He had lost a brother to the bar in the autumn of the great gale, and he went down to the water every night to count the boats, as if counting could bring one back. One night the lamp went out in his hand and he stood in the dark, cursing, until he felt something cool slide round his wrist and tug, gently, towards the deep. He did not shout. He said afterwards it felt like being asked a question.

What he did next is the part the fishwives argue about. Some say he cut the arm free with his knife. Others say he sat on the wet stone and talked to her until dawn about his brother, and she listened with that amber eye, and when the light came up she had let go and was gone, leaving a single green bead on his cuff. He kept it in his tobacco tin for forty years. Ask anyone on the pier and they'll tell you it still hasn't rusted.

So when you see a lamp on the slipway after dark, don't go down to look. It's only the sea keeping its word.