Fine line jellyfish tattoo with a blue watercolour-style bell and dark trailing tendrils, running down the side of a woman's back and ribs.

Jellyfish tattoo along side of back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A jellyfish with a soft blue watercolour-style bell sits on the side of the back, with long, thin black tendrils trailing down towards the waist. Below the tendrils, a small line of script is visible near the hip. The photograph is taken from behind and to the side, with the subject's head cropped out of frame.

Fine line Back Ribs Jellyfish Tendril Watercolour Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jellyfish came in on the August tide the summer I turned fifteen, a blue bell of it lying on the sand below the Hollin Street baths like someone had dropped a lampshade. Dad said they came every few years when the wind sat in the north-east, and that we were not to touch them, because the stings raised welts that lasted a week. I touched it anyway with a stick, and the threads came up after the stick like hair drifting in a bath.

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Mrs Ashdown from the chemist's kept a lightbox in her back room for pressing flowers for the church fête, and she once told me that a thing could keep its colour after it dried if you caught it in the right light. So I carried the bell home in a bucket of seawater, past the shuttered pier and the grocer's, and set it on the kitchen table beside the flour tin. Mum stood in the doorway with the tea towel over her shoulder and said nothing, which was how I knew she was frightened for me.

By the time the lamps came on, the bell had gone slack and pale, and I thought I had ruined it. Then I held it to the window and the blue came back through it, soft as breath on cold glass, the long black threads hanging down like the ink strokes in Dad's ledger. I pinned it to the wall above the sink. He looked at it for a long while that night, then took his coat from the hook and walked down to the harbour without a word.

He came back at dawn with wet cuffs and an empty jam jar, and set it on the sill. "Next one," he said, "you ask me first." Out past the groyne the sea lay flat and bright, and the tide was already turning, drawing the shallow water back over the sand as if it had only borrowed the thing and meant to take it home.