Black and grey realism tattoo of an octopus with curling tentacles spanning the entire back.

Realistic octopus across a full back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus fills the back, with its head and mantle at the centre and tentacles curling out toward the shoulders and down the side. The skin texture, suckers and scales are rendered with fine, smooth shading and strong contrast, and soft grey clouds sit behind the animal. The image is entirely black and grey, with the wide framing showing the full composition across the back.

Realism Back Octopus Tentacle Sucker Cloud Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Porthmerry Bay would touch the old pot at the end of the mole, because the thing inside it had been there since the spring the Castor went down. Dessie Kemp, who mended nets for his mother's shop, said it had eight arms for every one a man had, and that it counted the boats in and out. The children dared each other to lift the lid. Nobody did.

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In the August of 1956 the weather came in grey and stayed grey. Cloud sat on the water so low the gulls walked on it. Maud Tregarthen, whose husband had not come home from the Castor, rowed out alone at dawn with a sack of mackerel heads and a lantern she did not light. She set the sack down beside the pot and said what she had to say, which was that she was tired of waiting for the sea to give anything back.

The lid lifted by itself. A pale arm came over the rim, slow, sucking at the wood, then another, until the whole creature was pouring out of the pot like spilt ink. It did not touch the fish. It wound one arm round the bow, gently, the way you would catch a dropped cup, and pressed its dark eye close to her face. She felt the cold suckers at her wrist and nothing more.

When she came ashore the village saw her boat riding low, with something heavy under the tarpaulin. Dessie found a brass button from his father's coat caught in a sucker, and a tin of tobacco wedged under the thwart. The octopus was never caught again. Maud still walks the mole on foggy mornings, and the pot is left open now, with a dish of mackerel heads on the stones beside it.