Red line drawing of an octopus with curling tentacles and detailed suckers on a white background, shown as a tattoo design rather than on a body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red ink octopus with curling tentacles

Colour · Flash

A single octopus is drawn in red ink on a plain white background, with its tentacles curling upwards and outwards around the body. The linework uses fine, dense hatching for shading and small circular outlines for the suckers. The composition is vertical and centred, with the tentacles filling the frame and ending in loose curls.

Octopus Tentacle Sucker 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

Sit nearer the fire, and mind the tide, for it always listens when a story is told too loudly. In the kingdom of Vellenmoor, which you will not find on any chart your schoolmaster unrolled, the net-menders dyed their twine the colour of cherries, and they swore the sea had taught them how.

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Marit was the best of them, and proud with it. One winter the cod stopped coming, and her brother's boat went out beyond the reef and did not come back. She rowed alone to the black rocks where the old octopus kept house, a creature as wide as a cartwheel, and she asked it for her brother. The octopus did not speak. It unwound one arm, slow as a sleeping cat's tail, and laid it across the bow of her boat. Every sucker on that arm was a small red ring, and each ring had a knot tied beside it.

"Count them," it seemed to say, though the water never moved. "Count them true, and I will count you back."

So Marit counted. She counted the rings on the arm, then the next arm, then the next, until her fingers were stained red to the knuckle and the lamps on the quay had burned low twice. She reached the last sucker on the last arm just as the grey light came up over the reef, and she gave the number aloud, and her voice cracked on it.

The octopus loosened its grip. Far off, on a sandbar, a boat stood upright in the shallows with her brother asleep in the bottom of it. Marit's nets still hang in Vellenmoor, and if you look closely at the knots, you will see the red thread is never quite dry.