Black and grey jellyfish tattoo with stippled bell and long trailing tentacles, shown on the upper arm near the shoulder.

Jellyfish on the upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A jellyfish drifts diagonally across the skin, with its bell at the upper left and long, wavy tentacles trailing down and to the right. The bell and tentacles are built from fine engraved linework and hatching, with dense stippling on the outer edge of the bell and solid black shading inside its opening. The image is taken in soft light against a pale background, and the tattoo fills most of the frame.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Jellyfish Tentacle Sea creature Ocean

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spring tide had been over the lower courtyard since Tuesday, so Aunt Morwenna and I went in by the postern gate with a lamp and a bucket of lime. Carrick Hollin had been losing its stones to the sea for two hundred years, and every spring someone had to decide which of them was worth keeping.

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We found the jellyfish in the undercroft, where the water stood black and still between the broken pillars. It hung just under the surface, its bell a pale dome edged with a fine stipple, like frost on a windowpane. Beneath it the tentacles unspooled in long wavering lines, some thick and folded over one another like wet linen, others so thin they were only a suggestion of light against the dark stone.

Morwenna wanted it out. Jellies in the cellars meant the drains were blocked, she said, and blocked drains meant the wall would go by autumn. I knelt on the step with the lamp held low and watched the bell pulse, slow as breathing, and thought of the rhyme my grandmother used to sing about the castle keeping the sea in its cellars. I did not want to be the one who emptied it.

So I left the grating open and let it drift out through the arch on the evening tide. Afterwards I drew its shape on the wall in chalk, the bell at the top and the ribbons falling away, so that whoever came with the lime next spring would know what had been there. The tide came in over the step that night and found the chalk still white on the stone.