Painted flash-style design of a tearful woman with red octopus tentacles wrapping around her head and an octopus body above, drawn on cream paper with a pale blue wash.

Woman with octopus tentacles design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A painted illustration shows a woman with closed, tearful eyes and red lips, her hair replaced by large red octopus tentacles with pale suckers. A red octopus head sits at the top of the composition, with its arms curling around the figure. The bold outlines, glossy shading and warm red palette are set against a cream background with soft blue wash.

Neo-trad Woman Octopus Tentacle Tear Sucker

Find an artist for this

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

The lamp at Scarrow Head had been dark for three nights when you climbed the iron stairs with a tin of matches and Mr Achterberg's logbook under your arm. He left you one rule before the boat took him south: never answer the sea when it calls your name in a voice you know. You kept that rule through two winters of gales. Then the November storm cracked the lower glass, and the tide pushed a red thing up the shingle, wrapped around a drowned gull.

Keep reading

It was not dead. It unwound from the bird with a patience that made your teeth ache, and its arms found the rail, then the shutter, then your wrist. Its eye was the grey of a pewter plate and it watched you without blinking. The wind carried your mother's name up the tower, then your own, with water in the vowels. You thought of the logbook and the blank page where you had never written what you were waiting for.

So you stopped pulling and asked it what it wanted. It led you down the spiral stair to the rock pool beneath the light, where the water went dark as claret. Something pale rose through the surface: a face with its eyes shut, tears running into the brine, lips painted the red of the warning beacon. It was not you, though it wore your mouth, and it was weeping because nobody had come down to the rock in a hundred years.

You knelt beside it. The arms let go of your wrist one sucker at a time, each one lifting from your skin like a coin from a counter. Before dawn you filled the lamp with paraffin and lit it by hand, and the beam swept red across the water. The fishermen at Scarrow said the sea looked gentler that morning. The keeper who came up the stairs in spring found the logbook open, the last line written in your hand: Lamp lit. Company kept.