Black and grey Japanese-style tattoo of a horned, fanged beast with whiskers and a curling tail, shown on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horned beast with whiskers on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a horned creature with a fanged, open mouth, whiskers and a long curling tail, drawn with bold black outlines. Fine stippling and smooth grey shading build up the face, horns and a dark smoky mass behind the head. The image is shown in black and grey, with the design filling most of the frame against a pale surface.

Japanese Blackwork Forearm Beast Demon Fangs Whiskers Tail Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook on the Marigold had never once seen the creature come up from the hold, but every night the smoke from the galley stove leaned the wrong way, toward the forward hatch, and the pots rang as if someone were tapping them with a knuckle.

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Captain Ansel Hebb said it was rats. The ship's boy, Tobias Quill, was sent down with a lantern and came back up white, saying the rats in the bilge had all turned to face the same direction, and that one of them had horns.

On the fortieth day out, with the water barrels half empty and the wind dead, the beast came up the ladder itself. It was black as a chimney flue, its horns scraped with barnacle, and its whiskers were long as oars. It did not want the bread or the salt pork. It wanted the tallow candle the boy had been hiding in his sock, and when he gave it over, it curled its long tail round the mainmast and blew smoke across the becalmed sea until the stars went out one by one.

Then the wind came back. The beast drew its tail in, looked at the sailors with the patience of an old landlord, and went down through the hatch the way it had come. In the morning the candle stub lay on the galley table, lit, and the cook swore the flame had never once guttered, though the Marigold made port with every barrel full.