Black ink line drawing of a jellyfish with a dotted, stippled bell and wavy trailing tentacles, drawn on paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jellyfish line drawing design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink outline drawing of a jellyfish with a domed bell and long, wavy tentacles that overlap and curl across the page. The bell is partly filled with fine dots and short hatched marks, while the tentacles use plain, continuous contour lines. The image is in black and white on a pale sheet, with the drawing filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Jellyfish Tentacle Sea creature Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The surge came in on Tuesday night and left the lower field a grey lake that hasn't gone down. Dad says it will take till Lady Day to drain, and the ewes stand on the bank with their heads low, looking at it as if it owes them money. I went out at first light with the bucket and the broken gate, and that's when I found her in the cattle trough by the dyke.

She was the size of a dinner plate, domed and clear as a bad window, and her arms had come all the way up the dyke on the back of the water. They crossed over each other the way wet washing does on a line, lifting and folding in the cold. I stood there with my boots going numb and thought of the drawing you made me in Year Six, the one with the ribbons. I didn't know then that ribbons were meant to look like that. Pretty, and no use to anyone.

I tipped her into the bucket with the lid of the feed tin, because I couldn't bear to leave her in the trough, and carried her to the edge of the new water where the reeds stop. The sea is a long way off from here. I don't know what I thought would happen. I tipped her out and she sank slowly, her lines trailing after her like thread let go from a spool.

Dad asked this morning whether I'd been crying. I said it was the wind. It was the wind, mostly. Come at Easter if the roads allow it, and bring that drawing.

Love, Meg