The hairhead sculpin was first formally described in 1915 by the Russian zoologists Vladimir Konstantinovich Soldatov and Mikhail Nikolaevich Pavlenko with its type locality given as the Strait of Tartary in the Sea of Japan.

[1] The hairhead sculpin's genus name, Trichocottus prefixes Cottus with tricho which means "hair" or "ray", presumed to be an allusion to the many cirri on the head.

[4] The hairhead sculpin has a dark reddish brown head with a white spotted brown body, a white band around the caudal peduncle and a blackish base to the pectoral fin.

Scales are mostly absent, other than a few short, rows of prickly bony plates on the flanks which are partially obscured by the pectoral fin, these first appear in fishes with a total length of around 95 mm (3.7 in).

It is a demersal fish living along the sandy substrates of the seafloor at depths of up to 87 m (285 ft).