Black and white flash sheet of crescent-moon eyes, octopus tentacles, triangle borders and stripes, designed as temporary tattoo artwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sheet of eyes, octopus tentacles and bands

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white flash sheet showing a set of stylised eyes with crescent-moon pupils, some set inside sunburst and circular frames. Octopus tentacles with curled tips, a triangle-edged border strip, solid bars and a hexagon-dot band fill the rest of the page. The linework is bold and solid with no shading, and the layout is spaced so each motif can be cut out and used separately.

Traditional Eye Crescent moon Octopus Tentacle Triangle Stripe Hexagon Sunburst

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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

You have the night desk at Scarrow Quay because the day man won't take the Thursday boats, and the Thursday boats bring the odd crate. The manifest says 'net floats, sundry, Lisbon to Scarrow', and it is correct about the floats. It says nothing about the sheet of black card folded beneath them, a flash sheet covered in eyes, each one a sharp lens shape with a crescent moon sitting where a pupil should be.

Keep reading

You hold it under the lamp. Someone has drawn octopus arms curling at their tips as if reaching for the margins, and the sunburst eye has a ring of teeth. The bars along the bottom look like a fence somebody forgot to finish. Nothing on it is contraband. You should stamp it through and go home. Instead you take the scissors from the drawer and cut out the smallest eye, leaving a neat white gap in the sheet, and you put the card in your pocket.

Your cubicle window faces the water. Around two, a trawler with no lights idles past the breakwater, and a man on its deck looks up at the customs post as though he is counting windows. You press the little eye against the glass with a strip of tape. Its moon catches the harbour lamp and holds it.

By morning the trawler is gone and the eye is still there, and so are you, watching the sea for it to blink.