Black ink drawing on kraft paper of a stitched, cartoon octopus with large staring eyes and shaded tentacles, shown as a flash design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stitched octopus creature design

Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a cartoon octopus with a large rounded head, a stitched seam running down its front, and two big staring eyes. Fine hatching and cross-hatching shade the head and the pointed tentacles, with small bubbles drawn beneath. The design is drawn in black ink on a brown paper background, centred with plenty of space around the figure.

Octopus Creature Stitches Eye Tentacle Bubble

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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

Mr Pollard had come to us in a biscuit tin, stitched along his forehead with waxed thread, and he never once let anyone forget it. My landlady, Mrs Teague, swore he was a gift from her late husband, who had sailed as a deckhand and claimed to have seen a squid the size of a chapel. We kept him in the copper bath on the top floor, where the light came through the skylight in long brown stripes.

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He was not a clever creature, but he was a watcher. Those two great eyes followed me across the landing, and when I carried the lodgers' post up the stairs he would rise on his pointed tentacles and bubble at me like a kettle coming to the boil. I fed him cockles from the fishmonger on Harbour Street. Each morning the bath water smelled of the sea, though nobody had filled it with sea water in years.

In August the wind swung round to the east and Mr Pollard grew restless. He pressed his forehead against the enamel until the stitches creaked. On the last Sunday of the month I wrapped him in a damp towel, carried him down the back stairs past Mrs Teague's snoring, and walked him the length of the prom at dawn with the gulls complaining overhead.

At the end of the pier I unwrapped him. He looked at the water, then at me, and I swear the stitches loosened a little, as if someone had pulled the thread from the other side. He slid over the rail without a splash. A moment later a column of bubbles rose beside the piling, then one more, faint as a thought, and I went home to tell Mrs Teague the bath was empty.