Black and grey pencil drawing of a jellyfish with long trailing tentacles, shown as a tattoo design on paper, realism style.

Jellyfish design in pencil shading

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of a jellyfish with a domed bell and long, wavy trailing tentacles on a pale grey background. The bell and oral arms are rendered with fine hatching and soft graded shading, giving the body volume and translucence. The composition is a single vertical figure with the tentacles fanning out towards the bottom of the frame.

Realism Jellyfish Tentacle Sea creature Ocean

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp is going round again and you are counting its turns the way your mother counted stitches, under her breath, losing her place. Below the gallery rail the Sound is black and flat, except where the moon has laid a path across it that nothing should be able to walk. Something is drifting up through the path. You lean over the iron, cold through your sleeves, and watch the bell of it rise like a lampshade pulled slowly through water.

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Tom Ruddock, the keeper, says they come in with the spring tides and do no harm to anyone who keeps their hands in their pockets. He says it from the kitchen, where he is frying bread. You tell him it is the most beautiful thing you have seen since the ferry brought in the coffin of a man nobody came to bury, and he doesn't laugh. The tentacles trail behind it for what looks like a mile, fine as hair combed out of a ribbon, lifting and falling with a slowness that makes your own breathing seem rushed.

You have a pencil in your coat, the stub from the logbook, and a sheet of the station's ruled paper. By the time the lamp has swept round twice you have drawn the dome, the ridged edge of it like the rim of a dinner plate, and the frilled arms hanging down. Your hand shakes less than it did. When the beam crosses the page the lines go pale, then dark, as if the paper were breathing too.

At dawn the creature has gone out past the breakwater, and the sea has closed over the place like a page turned down. Tom finds you asleep on the gallery with the sketch clutched to your chest. He doesn't ask what you saw. He only tilts the paper to the light, says quietly that it's a good likeness, and tells you to take it home before the tide claims the rest of the morning.