Black and grey realism style tattoo of a tentacled Cthulhu-like creature covering an upper arm, with a dark blade-like shape at the lower edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tentacled sea creature on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo shows a tentacled, Cthulhu-like creature with a rounded head and a bearded face, shown from the upper body down. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading that builds texture across the skin, scales and tentacles. The image is in black and grey with no colour, and the tattoo fills most of the frame against a dark background.

Realism Upper arm Creature Tentacle Octopus Monster

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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

Sit nearer the fire, you lot, the gulls have ears too. You want to know why the Bishop of Grennick never goes near the fishing boats? Forty years back his hands were in the wrong pockets, and the thing under the sea put a finger on his sleeve and asked him for a name. He gave it his own. That is how a bishop becomes a bell in the drowned church, and how that bell rings under the water on nights when the moon sits low over Ostry Point.

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Old Maud Pellow kept the lamp at the breakwater. She said the creature had a face like a wet grandfather, bearded with weed, its head rounded like a cooking pot turned upside down, and it wore its tentacles like a shawl, one always reaching for the rope of anyone who leaned too far. She did not fear it. She fed it mackerel heads and salt herbs, and in return it kept the herring off the Harrow Rocks where the gulls could not get at them.

The year the king's men came with their nets and their lanterns, Maud stood on the wall and told them to go home. They laughed. The youngest, a boy called Teodor with ink on his cuffs, pushed past her and cast a line into the black water to prove a point. Something took it gently, the way a mother takes a child's hand at a kerb.

Maud never saw Teodor come up. But on still mornings, when the lamp is out and the water lies flat as a slate, you can see a second bell swinging beneath the harbour wall, and a drowned ink-stained sleeve tangled in the weed beside it. Mind your line, and never give the sea a name it didn't ask for.