Small blue octopus tattoo with black dotted outlines and tentacles curling outwards, shown on a person's skin beside a silver coin held in fingers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small blue octopus tattoo with dotted outlines

Dotwork · Other · Colour · Photo

A small octopus with curling tentacles, its body filled with light blue and outlined in black dots that also form the suckers. The linework is simple and the dotted outlines give a stippled texture, with no shading beyond the flat blue fill. The octopus sits off-centre on the left of the frame, with a quarter coin held in fingers on the right for scale.

Dotwork Other Octopus Tentacle Sucker Dot

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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

Mags, the harbour office says the tide will not turn until nearly four, so I have a clear hour to write this properly before the boat goes out. You will laugh, but I took the little octopus you drew on my wrist last spring and gave it a name. The man who runs the fish stall at the end of the quay calls it Edwin, because he says anything that eight-armed ought to have a dignified name. Edwin has been very helpful. Yesterday he rearranged the crab pots on the slipway without being asked, which Mr Pryce has not forgiven.

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I went out to the far rocks at low water with the net and a jam jar, looking for the pale sea anemones your mother used to pin in her hat. Instead I found a whelk shell with a hole drilled neatly through the lip, and a coin lying in a crack, green with age, a king's head worn almost smooth. I put the coin in my pocket and the whelk back where it belonged, because it was clearly somebody's house.

What I am trying to say is that I have stopped being cross about the shop closing. The little blue dots on Edwin's arms are how I count things now, one for each sucker, one for each day I did not write to you. I know that is daft. Tell me it is daft.

The kettle is on and the gulls are arguing over the bins. If the tide cooperates I will bring you the coin on Sunday, and you can tell me what it was worth in 1890. Love to the girls. Give Edwin a biscuit from me, he deserves it.