Great white shark cruises Main Street in Huntington Beach mural

There’s a great white shark on Main Street in Huntington Beach.

And it’s getting a lot of attention.

The menacing fish is an acrylic mural on wood — a construction wall on Main Street at Walnut Avenue, in front of the Billabong store.

The shark is looking toward the pier. Beneath it are the words “The Landlord” — a surfer nickname for great whites that hints at the sharks’ dominance of the sea. That’s also the name of the work itself.

Huntington Beach residents Dan McNab and Hector “HEK” Valdez started painting the 8-foot-tall, 16-foot-wide mural Jan. 26. Within 24 hours, it was up.

McNab and Valdez are tattoo artists at the Tattoo Gallery on Beach Boulevard, but this is their first mural. They hope “The Landlord” will inspire more public art downtown.

“I just wanted to see if I could do a mural, to be honest,” McNab said.

“It was quite the process,” said Valdez, who ran unsuccessfully for City Council in 2014 and currently serves on the city’s Allied Arts Board. “It was cool to see how it started and where it ended, the attention to detail, the evolution of how it all went down.”

They started with a sketch approved by the building’s human landlords, who also gave them permission to paint on the construction wall.

The shark has some scars. The artists call them “battle wounds.”

If this great white were swimming off Huntington, Valdez and McNab figure it would be 30 feet long. That’s about 5 feet bigger than “Jaws” in the 1975 Steven Spielberg classic.

In a few weeks, the wall will be removed and the shark will need a new home.

McNab and Valdez want to auction their mural and give the proceeds to charity.

“At least five people want to put this in their backyard, behind their pool or something,” McNab said.

“The love and compassion and openness that people gave us, it’s been an inspiring deal,” he added. “I love how much has come out of it.”

bradley.zint@latimes.com

Twitter: @BradleyZint