Colour traditional-style tattoo of a red octopus with grey shading and a yellow eye, wrapping across the upper arm of a man in a blue vest top.

Red octopus tattoo on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large red octopus with a yellow eye and pale suckers curls over the upper arm, its tentacles coiling down towards the elbow. The body is shaded with grey and dark red, giving it volume, and the outlines are bold and dark. The subject fills most of the frame against a plain dark background, with the man's blue vest top visible at the edges.

Traditional Upper arm Octopus Tentacle Sucker Eye Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had three bushels stacked by the gate when the lower ditch began to slop and gurgle. The spring tide had come up through the culvert again, the way it did in the old stories her uncle told, and something was riding it. A red octopus hauled itself over the lip of the bank, its suckers pale as pared apple flesh, and sat in the wet grass to look at her with one yellow eye.

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"You're a long way from the harbour," she said, because her uncle always said you spoke civilly to anything that came uninvited. The octopus considered this. Then it reached one arm up the trunk of the nearest Bramley and began, slowly, to climb. Windfalls dropped where it passed and thudded into the grass, and Nell understood it was not stealing. It was counting.

It went tree by tree along the lower rows, touching each trunk with a curled tip as if checking a ledger, and the trees let go of their fruit as it passed. By dusk the grass was thick with apples and the octopus was back at the ditch, its colour darkening as the light went. Nell stood with the ladder on her shoulder and realised she had not once felt afraid, only faintly audited.

In the morning the tide had gone out and taken the octopus with it. A single apple sat on the bank by the culvert, bitten in a neat curve, and the bruises on it were the exact shape of a sucker. Nell left it where it was and went to fetch the sacks.