Black and grey tattoo on an upper arm showing a tentacled creature head beneath a full moon and stars, with swirling waves below.

Tentacled creature, moon and waves on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers the upper arm, showing a tentacled creature with octopus-like suckers beneath a full moon and scattered stars. A dark, hooded figure sits in the lower left of the composition, and stylised swirling waves wrap around the bottom of the piece. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft grey highlights on the moon and waves and heavier black areas in the sky and background.

Japanese Realism Upper arm Tentacle Full moon Star Wave Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon was full over the Trent the night Dorothy Ashby came aboard with her lantern and her sodden boots, and I should have put her ashore at Gainsborough. Instead I let her sit on the coal hatch while the Mary Gilchrist drifted past the silted bend. She said the river had been calling her by name since the spring floods, and that she had a debt to settle before the water rose again.

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The water went flat as glass, then bulged. Something rose beside us, a head like a drowned church bell, grey as wet slate, and arms unfurled from the surface with suckers pale as pennies in the moonlight. Waves folded back on themselves at the bow, curling like the ornaments on a pub sign. Tomasz, my deckhand, dropped the tiller pole and crossed himself twice, which I had never once seen him do.

Dorothy did not scream. She stood, pushed back her hood and spoke to the thing in a voice like gravel sliding down a chute. The great head lowered, and the arms drew back under the black water the way a tide goes out, slow and without fuss. Then she turned to me and said the debt was paid for another forty years, and that I would be the one to bring her back at the next full moon, or the river would come up through the hatch and collect us both.

At dawn the coal hatch was dry and the mooring rope lay coiled on the deck as neatly as bunting. I have not taken a fare since. Every full moon I find the rope coiled again, and once, beside the brass lamp, a single pale sucker stuck to the wood, cold as a coin.