Black ink drawing of a curling octopus tentacle with detailed suckers and textured shading, shown as a standalone tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Curling tentacle design with suckers

Black and grey · Flash

A tall, vertical drawing of an octopus tentacle that coils at the top and bottom, with rows of round suckers along its underside. The linework is bold and clean, with hatching and stippled texture used for shading across the skin of the tentacle. The design is shown in black ink on a white background with no colour.

Tentacle Octopus Sucker Spiral Sea creature

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

Don't you go pulling at that warp with your bare hands, boy. Not while she's still coiled like that. I once watched a man lose two fingers to a thing no longer than a boot, and he was the one who'd laughed at me for saying so.

Keep reading

We had the Heron's Daughter out past the Runnel Stone in February, the sea gone the colour of pewter, when the net came up heavy and wrong. We'd hoped for cod and got a single arm, thick as my thigh, wrapped round the mesh twice over and curling in at the end like a fiddlehead. Ned wanted the knife. I told him the arm had no business in our net at all, that it had come up from the deep looking for something it had lost, and I wasn't going to be the man who finished the search.

So we hauled it aboard in wet sacking. Every sucker was open, round and pale as a cupped palm, and when the lantern caught them they all seemed to turn towards the light at once. Ned swore it was looking at him. I cut the mesh away one strand at a time while the boat rolled, and the coil loosened by inches, testing the air, until the last loop let go and the whole length slid over the gunwale without a sound.

The tip touched the water and curled once more, tight as a watch spring, and for a moment I thought it had gone. Then it unfurled, slowly, and sank into the grey like a key turning back in its lock. Ned never laughed at me again. He still won't say what he saw in that lantern light.