Three-angle photo of a full sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm, showing a grey biomechanical creature with tentacles, skulls and faces in realistic shading.

Biomechanical full sleeve with tentacles and faces

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The sleeve shows a large biomechanical creature with a bulbous eye and skeletal jaw near the shoulder, with coiling tentacles and ribbed, organic forms running down the arm. Shading is detailed and realistic, built from dark greys and fine highlights, with faces and skull-like shapes appearing lower on the forearm. Muted pink and flesh tones are used in places, and the three-panel composition shows the sleeve from front, side and back against a black background.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Creature Tentacle Eye Skull Face Biomechanical Sleeve Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eel came up through the sluice gate on the third night of the flood, its eye as wide as a cartwheel and its jaw hung with bones like the ribs of a wrecked boat. Old Hobb the miller swore it was the river itself, and he took his lantern down to the wheel-house to see for himself, and he did not come back up the steps.

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In the kingdom of Varrow, where the river Lusk bends three times before the sea, folk knew better than to name what lived in the deep water. They tied rags to the sluice posts and left bread on the bank. But the coils kept climbing the mill race, and every coil carried a face pressed into its skin, pale and open-mouthed, and the faces were the faces of everyone the river had taken since the old queen's time.

Ysolde, Hobb's granddaughter, was the only one with the stomach to go down. She carried no lantern. She sat on the bottom step with her feet in the cold water and asked the creature what it wanted, and it answered in the sound a wet rope makes when it is pulled tight over a cleat. It wanted to be remembered by something other than its hunger. It wanted a name that was not a warning.

So she gave it her own name, and she sang it the lullaby her mother had sung over the cradles of drowned babies, and the creature loosened its coils one at a time. The faces slid from its skin like wet paper and sank, and the river went quiet. In the morning the wheel turned with a sound like someone humming, and on the sluice stones there were pink marks where the creature had pressed its weight, as if the water had been made to blush.