Black and grey tattoo of a ship's wheel and anchor wrapped in octopus tentacles, shown on the inner forearm.

Ship's wheel and anchor with octopus on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large ship's wheel sits above an anchor, with octopus tentacles wrapping around both and chain links running along the arms. The linework is fine and detailed, with grey shading giving the wood, metal and tentacles depth and texture. The design is shown in black and grey on a forearm, with the anchor filling the lower part of the composition.

Forearm Ship's wheel Anchor Octopus Tentacle Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The octopus had been wound round the wheel since Tuesday, and Gil Ansty had stopped arguing with it by Wednesday noon. Ruddock wanted the boathook. Mrs Pell, who cooked for the crew and had opinions about everything that came aboard, said to leave it be until the tide turned. So they steered by feel, the spokes slick under a tentacle the colour of wet slate, the anchor chain clinking through the suckers every time the Mabel's Hope rolled into the swell off the Cockle Shoal.

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By Thursday the fog had come down thick as wool, and the lead line said four fathoms and falling. Gil laid his hands over the arms on the wheel, the way you would hold a dog's paws to stop it pulling, and felt the whole animal lean one way and then the other. He had no proof of it. He let it take the spokes hard to starboard, and the drifter slid off the bank with a shudder that rang through the hull like a struck bell. Ruddock, who had called the whole business nonsense from the first, said nothing at all for an hour.

At first light the octopus was gone, though the chain still ran from the locker to the stern in a long wet curve. Gil found a single sucker stuck to the brass of the binnacle, pale as a farthing. He kept it in a tobacco tin on his mother's windowsill in Lowestoft, and he never once let anyone scrub the wheel with paraffin.