Squid Tattoo Meaning
Evasion, adaptability, survival, and obscuring to escape.
The ink came first.
Cephalopod ink — from squid, from octopus, from cuttlefish — was the ink of the ancient Mediterranean world. The Greeks and Romans wrote with it. The word sepia is the Latin name for the cuttlefish, and it is also the color of the ink it produces, and it is also the name of the photographic process that produces that color, and it is also now a common Instagram filter. The animal's defense mechanism became the medium through which civilization recorded itself.
The squid releases ink not as a cloud to hide in but as a decoy — a blob of ink mixed with mucus that holds its shape, roughly the size of the squid, dark enough to look like the squid. The predator strikes the ink-squid. The real squid is already somewhere else.
The Humboldt squid hunts in coordinated groups, flashing bioluminescent patterns across their skin to communicate — patterns that change faster than the human eye can follow, a language of light used to coordinate the hunt. What the patterns mean, exactly, is not yet known. The squid are talking to each other in a language no one has translated.
In Maori tradition, the giant squid — the deep-sea animal that left ring-shaped scars on sperm whales and was otherwise invisible — was Te Wheke-a-Muturangi, the great octopus-squid that the hero Kupe pursued across the Pacific from Hawaiki to Aotearoa. The pursuit of the impossible creature that left its mark but could not be seen: the myth of the first voyage.
The squid tattoo is the animal of strategic obscurity — the creature that escapes by leaving a perfect copy of itself behind.
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