Colourful neo-traditional octopus tattoo with tentacles curling down a forearm, shaded in pink, purple, orange, blue and green.

Rainbow octopus on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large octopus fills the forearm, its head raised at the top and its tentacles curling and trailing down the limb. Bold black outlines define the body, with fine hatched lines suggesting texture and suckers along the tentacles. Shading moves through pink, purple, orange, green and blue, and the image is framed tightly against a dark background.

Neo-trad Forearm Octopus Tentacle Sea creature

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond behind the vicarage has never frozen in living memory, and the octopus lives in it because the old gardener says so. You were nine the summer you first saw it, rising through the duckweed with its head lifted like a bishop reading a notice, every colour the sunset had left in the sky still stuck to its skin. Mr Harrow dropped his trowel and told you not to stare, because staring was how you got noticed by things that did not want noticing.

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You stared anyway. Each evening you crouched by the lily pads with a jam jar of brown bread, and each evening a tentacle lifted out of the water, pink as rhubarb, and took the crumbs from your palm with a suction like a small kiss. It curled round your wrist once, tight enough to leave a ring of cold, then loosened, as though it had only wanted to check you were solid.

The summer the rector had the pond drained, you found the octopus in the shallows, shrinking and grey, its colours draining off into the mud like dye from a wet shirt. You carried it to the rhubarb bed in your cupped hands and talked to it the whole way, the way Mr Harrow talked to sick seedlings. Next spring the rhubarb came up purple, then orange, then a green that glowed. Mr Harrow said nothing. He just went and fetched the trowel, and the two of you dug a new pond beside the shed, deep enough for anything that wanted to come back.