Colourful jellyfish tattoo on the inner forearm, with black outlined tentacles trailing over purple, blue, yellow and green washes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jellyfish tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A jellyfish with a dome-shaped bell in purple and pink sits low on the forearm, its long black-outlined tentacles curling upwards across the skin. Soft washes of blue, purple, yellow and green fill the area around the tentacles, giving a loose, painterly feel. The dark background frames the arm, with the design rising from the lower edge of the photo.

Forearm Jellyfish Tentacle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fiddler at the Pier Pavilion in Lowmarsh always tuned his strings before the tide turned, because the old women said the sea listened. That summer the tide came in at ten, and at ten a jellyfish came with it, a great purple bell of a thing that drifted through the open doors and hung above the dance floor like a lamp somebody had forgotten to light.

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Nobody danced with it. The young men stepped back, the girls held their skirts close, and the fiddler played on because he had promised the hall-keeper a full set. The jellyfish turned slowly under the rafters. Its long threads trailed down past the chandeliers, brushing the shoulders of the dancers, and wherever a thread touched cloth it left a streak of colour behind, blue then yellow then green, as though someone had been painting the air with a wet brush.

A girl called Ada Penrose, who mended nets for her uncle and had no patience for fright, took off her shoes and walked to the middle of the floor. She lifted one hand and let the nearest thread wind round her wrist. The fiddle slowed. The bell lowered, very gently, until it hung just over her head, and the whole hall held its breath while she began to step, slow as the tide, and the jellyfish sank and rose with her.

They say the threads are still up in the rafters, faint as cobweb, and that on still evenings the paint on the floorboards glows a little under the lamps. The hall-keeper never scrubbed it. He said it was the only dance he had ever seen where nobody needed telling when to stop.