Black ink linework drawing of a jellyfish with dotted detail and flowing tentacles, drawn as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jellyfish tattoo design on paper

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A jellyfish drawn in black ink on pale paper, with a patterned bell and long, flowing tentacles that trail down the page. The linework is fine and precise, with hatched shading along the body and stippled dots decorating the bell and tentacles. The subject sits centrally on a plain background with no colour.

Dotwork Fine line Jellyfish Tentacle Dot Sea creature Design

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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

Pass me the oil can, love, and mind the wick. The lamp wants watching the way a cat wants watching, or it sulks. My grandmother kept this light before me, and she used to say the sea sends us gifts that look like nothing, and you have to draw them down before they slip back under. Her sister Nan Ailsa drew jellyfish. Every evening she sat at the table beside the lens with a nib and a pot of Indian ink and made them out of the dark water she could see through the glass.

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The fishermen laughed at her. They said a jellyfish is only water with a grudge, and no man in Dunmore would pay a penny for a picture of one. But she kept drawing. She drew the bell with its little scalloped chambers, like the lid of a pie crust, and she dotted it with stipple the way spray dots a window. She hatched the body so it looked lit from underneath, and she let the tentacles run off the edge of the paper, because nothing in that sea ever stops where you want it to.

The winter the Mary Lowe went down off the Stacks, Ailsa's paper was the only thing that came ashore dry. It was in a biscuit tin, wrapped in oilcloth, and it was a jellyfish drawn so fine you could count the ribs in its skirt. Underneath, in a hand that wasn't hers, someone had written the name of the boy who had gone out that night. She had never met him. She had only drawn what the water kept doing.

Ailsa framed it and hung it in the lamp room, and after that she turned the light a little slower each night, so the boats would have time to see it. Hear that? The clockwork is loose again. Pass the oil, and mind the wick.