Fine line jellyfish tattoo with a soft blue wash across the ribs and back, with a short script word along the lower ribs.

Jellyfish tattoo across ribs and back

Fine line · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A jellyfish with a rounded blue bell and long flowing fine black tentacles spans the side of the torso, from the back down over the ribs. Delicate black linework is combined with soft blue and purple wash shading inside the bell, and the tentacles curl and trail downward. A small script word runs along the lower ribs beneath the jellyfish, and the background is plain dark.

Fine line Ribs Back Jellyfish Tentacle Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last up train left Porthkerris at twenty to ten, and by then the tide had already crept over the bottom step of the footbridge. My uncle Len had said it would. In forty years on the signal box he never once saw the sea ask the railway's permission for anything.

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He kept a jar of blue ink on the sill beside the lever frame. Between trains he would paint jellyfish on the backs of spare timetable sheets, the bells washed with colour so pale it looked like weather over water, then pull the trailing lines out with a steel nib so fine they seemed to move when the lamp swung. He said the lines were the only part that mattered. A bell could be patched, but a line once set down was set for good.

After the funeral I found one in the back of his drawer, a jellyfish with its blue bleeding out into the paper where a cup of tea had gone over it. Underneath, in his square capitals, he had written KEEP THE LINES LOOSE. I took the first train to the junction the next morning with it folded inside my coat, and I did not look at it once.

On the way back the platform was wet from the night's rain, and the tide had left a ribbon of foam on the footbridge steps that ran all the way down to the water. I stood under the canopy and unfolded the sheet. The wind took it before I could decide anything, and it went out over the rails, bell first, trailing its black threads behind it like something that had finally been let go.