Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a woman's face framed by teal hair, octopus tentacles and peach shells, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman portrait with teal hair and tentacles on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a woman's face with pale skin, red lips and rosy cheeks, framed by teal wavy hair with a pearl headpiece. Octopus tentacles curl through the hair, and large peach and orange shell motifs fill the background on either side. Bold outlines and smooth, solid colour shading dominate, set against the skin of an arm.

Neo-trad Upper arm Woman Portrait Octopus Tentacle Shell Pearl Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shell stall had been my mother's before it was mine, and she never let me sell a shell with a crack in it. The pier was dying, the council said, but the gulls still queued for the chips I threw off the end at dusk, and Marisol Vell still came every second Thursday to buy one pearl. She paid in coins gone green at the edges, counted out slowly from a purse that smelt of brine.

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I never asked what she wanted them for until the autumn the rail was closed for repairs and the pier emptied out. She told me the pearls were for the woman under the boards, who had lost her comb in a storm and could no longer keep her hair in order. Her hair was the colour of the sea just before rain, and she needed the pearls to pin it back from her face, Marisol said, so she could watch the boats coming in.

On the next Thursday I followed her down the iron ladder at low water. Beneath the boards was a chamber lit by the wet glow of the sea walls, lined with fan shells the colour of apricot and rust. The woman there had a face like a painted saint and eight arms of teal that curled through her waves of hair, and she took the pearl from my hand without a word, then pressed a single green coin into my palm.

The coin bore my mother's initials, scratched in with a pin. She had walked off this pier the winter I turned nine, and the stall had never once been locked. I fitted a fresh hook to the ladder that night and left the pearl tin open on the counter, because some debts are only paid with the door unlatched.