Fine line blue jellyfish tattoo with dotwork dots and a line of script on a woman's upper arm.

Blue jellyfish on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A blue jellyfish with a domed bell and long trailing tentacles is drawn in fine lines, with its tendrils fading into scattered dots. A thin line of cursive script runs down the arm beside the jellyfish. The single blue ink sits on pale skin against a grey vest top and a plain grey background.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Jellyfish Dot Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tobiah,

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The lamp men say the moon jellies have come up the estuary again, early, and the harbour at Vell has gone the colour of Father's ink pot. I went down the steps after supper with a jar and a candle stub, the way you used to, and there was one caught in the ring of the old mooring chain. Its bell was no bigger than a teacup and it pulsed, slow as a clerk counting, while its threads trailed down into the black water and thinned to nothing.

I did not take it. I sat on the bottom step with my skirts wet to the knee and wrote your name on the wall in chalk, the way Mother taught us to write on the slates, and the jelly drifted up to read it. Or perhaps it did not. The harbour master's boy says they have no eyes at all, only a sort of light that tells them where the surface is.

Forty days since the Marigold cleared the bar. The king's proclamation was nailed up at the market cross last week, something about the western passage being closed to all vessels under the royal seal, and Father swore at it in a way that made the gulls leave. I keep thinking of the dots the jellies leave behind them in the shallows, like someone shook a pen over the tide. Come home by the spring tides if you can. If you cannot, send word with the next barge and I will read it to the chain.

Your sister, Ilse