The technical effects in this sea creature are clean and sharp. It fashions the tattoo into fresh, vibrant body art with cleanly inscribed color fill and strong lines. Love how the shading inspires comparison to the body armor of a seahorse.

You’ll struggle to find a cleaner black and gray animal tattoo. It’s etched with an almost cartoon like larger than life mentality. The suckers look strong, bubbling at the bottom of a crisply delivered head and body shaped by light shade and negative space. The Japanese style fills at the top – and neg space curve of seaweed – give the tattoo a fully fleshed out, well balanced aspect.

A heavy duty, busy octopus calf tattoo (they are almost always orange, was there a discount on this color ink?), again using Irezumi elements to help scale the art work. This piece lacks the clarity of some others in this piece, but the age of the work in this image may be a factor – this piece was completed a long time ago. One area i’d touch up is the beast’s eyes – they could do with some bright yellow or burnished gold fills to make them stand out in the image center.

This tattoo carries an epic Jules Verne 20000 Leagues Under the Sea Vibe. I like how the captain’s stern visage and fresh detailed pipe hand mix with the realistic aquatic skin shade effects of the octopus. The artist has cleverly manipulated the space available to create a beastly inner arm art work of style and elegance.

This is killer chest ink. The octopus is essentially a mix of geometric concepts fleshed out with sharp lines and fine black ink fills to create an almost tribal tattoo. Love the head and mantle (globe bit) filled with negative space circles surrounded by black fill. The artist has shown a superb sense of technique and style within a simple black delivery.

Another busy neo traditional octopus upper arm sleeve. It’s colorful and vivid, but somewhat confusing due to the odd choice of eye ink and lack of clearly defined facial features. The traditional anchor part of the tattoo is well done, serving to break up the creature’s colorful chaos with gray ink and smooth rope effects.