Black and grey realism tattoo of an octopus wearing a top hat and round spectacles and holding a steaming teacup, on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Top-hatted octopus with teacup on shoulder blade

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large octopus wears a top hat and round spectacles and holds a teacup with curling steam, with its tentacles spread across the design. The linework is fine and the suckers and skin texture are shaded in soft greys with deep blacks along the edges. The design is in black and grey only and sits centrally on the upper back, with plain pale skin around it.

Realism Back Shoulder Octopus Top hat Teacup Steam Tentacle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Harrowgate Travelling Show lost its elephant in the spring and its ringmaster to a card game in Leeds, so by August the only attraction worth a penny was Mr Pellow in his tank beside the ticket booth. He came to us off a Whitby trawler, a grey, cross-tempered octopus with a taste for brass buttons, and Father dressed him in a silk top hat and a pair of round wire spectacles so the farmers would stop and laugh. I was nine when I first fed him mussels, and I have fed him every morning since, which is how I came to be the one who had to tell him the truth.

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The truth was the takings. Forty people on a Saturday, then twelve, then the wind tore the big top in October and we sat under canvas like a row of wet hens. Mr Pellow watched the empty benches through the glass, spectacles pushed up over his mantle, and when Father poured his evening tea he would reach for the cup with one long arm, the way a gentleman takes a cup from a silver tray. Father said it was nonsense, animals do not take tea. Mr Pellow took it anyway and held it until the steam thinned.

On the last night before the caravans were hitched, I found him with a tentacle curled over the lip of the tank, tapping pennies from the collection box into a neat heap on the boards. Forty-three of them. I did not sell him to the man from the aquarium in Scarborough, though he offered twenty pounds. Instead I filled the best cup to the brim and set it on the rim of the tank, and I went to bed.

In the morning the water was still and the tank was empty. The spectacles sat folded beside the cup, and the top hat was gone, which Father said was the first sensible thing the creature had ever done.