The sense of touch allows individuals to physicallyinteract with and better perceive their environment. Touch is evenmore crucial for robots, as robots equipped with thorough tactilesensation can more safely interact with their surroundings, includ-ing with humans. This study describes a recently developed large-scale tactile sensing system for a robotic link, called TacLINK,which can be assembled to form a whole-body tactile sensing robotarm. The proposed system is an elongated structure consistingof a rigid transparent bone covered by continuous artificial softskin. This soft skin of TacLINK not only provides a pleasantinteractive interface but can also change outer skin morphologyby inflation at low pressure. Upon contact with the surroundingenvironment, TacLINK perceives tactile information through the3-D deformation of its skin, resulting from the tracking of anarray of markers on its inner wall by a stereo camera located atboth ends of the transparent bone. A finite element model wasformulated to describe the relationship between applied force andthe displacements of markers, allowing detailed tactile informa-tion, such as contact location and force distribution, to be derivedsimultaneously, regardless of the number of contacts. TacLINKis scalable in size, durable in operation, and low in cost, as wellas being a high performance system, characteristics that can beexploited in the design of interactive robotic arms, prostheticarms, and service robots. This study describes the design of theTacLINK, as well as its modeling, implementation and evaluation,with the results suggesting that similar tactile sensing systems canbe widely applied in robot