Tentacles

In sexual culture, tentacles refers to a genre of erotic art and fantasy featuring tentacled creatures, usually octopuses or invented monsters, in contact with human figures. Its roots trace to Japanese shunga woodblock prints, most famously Katsushika Hokusai's 1814 work The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife. In the late 20th century, manga artist Toshio Maeda revived the motif, using tentacles as stand-ins for genitalia to work around Japanese laws restricting explicit depiction of sex organs. The genre mixes fantasy, horror, and science fiction and remains a small, niche part of adult media in Japan and beyond. It appears across LGBTQ+ and broader kink communities as one expression of the wide range of human erotic imagination.