Black ink drawing of a woman's face framed by flowing hair, feathers and a tentacle, in a fine line and dotwork style, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman's portrait with feathers and tentacle

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a woman's face, looking towards the viewer, with long hair that flows into feather shapes on one side and a tentacle with suckers wrapping around the other. The linework is fine and hatched, with dotted stippling on the suckers and scale patterns on the tail-like form. The drawing is entirely in black ink on a light background, with the composition running vertically down the page.

Fine line Dotwork Woman Portrait Feather Tentacle Octopus Scale Hair Face

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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire, because this is the part where the sea comes up the hill to fetch what it lost. The kingdom was called Halsmere, and its queen had hair so long that the gulls nested in it. Nobody remembers her face, only that the hair ran down her back and out over the harbour wall, and that it moved even when the wind did not.

Keep reading

One evening a fisherman named Tobin Vell hauled up a net that held no fish at all, only a grey tentacle wound round a bundle of gull feathers, its suckers opening and closing like a row of small mouths. He knew better than to cut it loose. He carried it up to the palace in a barrel of brine, and the queen met him on the steps with her hair already lifting from her shoulders, feathers unspooling from the strands like ribbons.

Here is the turn, and I will tell it plainly. The tentacle was never the sea's. It was hers. Her grandmother had traded a voice to the deep for a sailing season that never ended, and the bargain was paid in feather and scale, one piece at a time, until nothing of it remained but the hair. The queen lifted the tentacle from the barrel and wound it round her own wrist, and the suckers settled there as though they had been waiting for her.

Mind the fire now. Tobin walked home that night along the harbour wall, and the gulls slept in the grey hair that flowed out over the stones, and not one of them stirred as he passed.