Colour realism tattoo of a purple octopus with teal-suckered tentacles curling across the outer thigh.

Purple octopus with curling tentacles on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large octopus wraps its tentacles around the outer thigh, with its body in the centre and its yellow eye visible on the side of the head. The tentacles curl at their tips and are shaded in purple, violet and teal, with pale suckers along their undersides. Soft shading and highlights give the body a rounded, three-dimensional look against the skin.

Realism Thigh Octopus Tentacle Sucker Sea creature Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mother Hilda, the octopus has taken the tithe box again, and this time Brother Oswin says we must let it keep the lid. I have stopped arguing with him about it. The creature lives in the cistern under the refectory steps, where the old sea wall lets the tide slop in twice a day, and it has learned our routine better than most of the brothers have.

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Its colour is the trouble. In lamplight it goes the purple of the bishop's Lent cloth, and when it is cross, a bruised violet, with rings of pale green along its arms like the glaze on the chapel tiles. Its eye is the only gold thing on the island that nobody has sold. Brother Oswin says it watches us the way the Abbot watches the collection plate. I say it watches the way a sensible person watches the weather.

Yesterday it reached out of the cistern while I was filling the bucket and wrapped one arm around my wrist, curling the tip gently, the way a child tests a bannister. I did not pray. I stood very still and counted the suckers, which I had never managed before, and when I reached forty it let go, unhurried, and slid back under the steps with the lid of the tithe box still held in the last curl of its arm.

I have written to the Abbot asking for a second box. I will tell you what I have not told him: I think the creature is keeping an account of its own, and I am no longer sure we are the ones in debt.