Jellyfish tattoo on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A jellyfish is tattooed on the forearm, with its bell built from stippled dots and fine shading that give it texture and depth. Long, thin tentacle lines trail downward and curl across the arm, with scattered dots and splatter marks around them. The work is entirely in black and grey ink against a dark background.

Dotwork Fine line Forearm Jellyfish Tentacle Sea creature

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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

Log, Gull Point Light, 14th September. Wind south-westerly, force three, sea flat as slate. Took the bloom at first light from the gallery. Thousands of them in the lee of the breakwater, bells pulsing together like a clock nobody had wound. Mrs Penhallow from the shop came down to the slip with a bucket and went back up without it.

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15th. The bloom has moved in under the harbour wall and I cannot see the bottom of the steps for them. Their threads hang in the green water like the lines of a drawing someone has worked on too long, fine and knotted, catching the light and then letting it go. Tom Eddy, who has fished this coast forty years, says they do not sting, only weigh. He said it as though heaviness were a kind of cruelty.

17th. The count stopped at the fourth day. I went down at low water with the lamp and the net and found one stranded on the concrete, dried to grey lace, its bell still ribbed like a ceiling in an old church. I laid it on the ledger, the only flat thing I own. By morning the ink had bled into its outline. The tide came back and took the rest.

19th. Lamp fired at dusk. From the gallery the water showed lit from below, each bell a faint lantern, every thread drawn down into the dark as if something at the bottom were gathering them in. I have written the count as nil. I have not written the other thing, which is that the threads kept moving after the bells had gone still, and that they were moving towards the light.