Colour tattoo of a tentacled, green-eyed sea creature across a man's shoulder and upper arm, with tentacles running down the arm.

Cthulhu-style creature across shoulder and upper arm

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a large tentacled creature with a ridged, armoured-looking head, glowing green eyes and a tentacled mouth, with its tentacles extending down the upper arm. The forms are painted with soft gradients and dark outlines, giving a painterly, slightly textured finish. Teal and grey-green dominate, with red-brown and purple accents around the eyes and shadowed areas, set against bare skin in a plain, pale background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the lamp closer, Davy, no, the other side, where the light can get at the rope. There. Now you can see what we hauled up that February, and you can see why my father never again let a Lowestoft man tell him the Dogger was empty.

Keep reading

We were four days north of Whitby with a trawl full of cod that had no business being so thin. The net came up heavy and wrong, and when the fish slid out of the mesh there was a thing in the bottom of it, grey-green as a bottle, with a head like a bishop's mitre cut from slate. Its eyes were the green of the lamp on the harbour wall at home. Nobody swore. Nobody prayed either. My father took the knife from his belt and walked very slowly to the stern.

It took the mate by the wrist, gently, the way a baker tests a loaf. Father put the blade into the thickest arm, and it let go, and the whole length of it slid over the gunwale like a dropped scarf. Then the sea went flat and oily, and for an hour there were green lights moving under the hull, keeping pace with us all the way to the Tyne.

We put in at South Shields with nothing to sell but a bad story and a curl of grey skin the mate kept in a tin of salt. Every spring after, my father ran the boat past that same bank with one hand on the wheel and his eyes on the water. He never once looked for cod. He was looking for the lamps, and when they came he would nod, the way you nod to a neighbour across the street, and say, Still there, then.

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