Colour tattoo of a jellyfish in blue, purple and teal, with swirling ornamental detail in the bell, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jellyfish tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A jellyfish fills the length of a limb, with a domed bell decorated with swirling, wave-like patterns above a ruffled band. Trailing tentacles and a spotted blue body run down beneath it. The linework is bold and smooth, and the shading moves through purple, teal and light blue against the skin, on a plain clinical background.

Forearm Jellyfish Swirl Tentacle Ocean Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down before the wind takes your hat, because this is a story about the lake that drank itself. My grandmother knew the man who drove the salt road when the flats still held water, a long blue sheet you could see from the ridge at dawn. He carried mail to the mine camp in a Bedford van with a cracked windscreen, and he said the water was never still. It moved in rings and swirls, as if someone were stirring it from underneath.

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One August the van broke down a mile short of the camp, and the sun came up white over the crust. He sat on the running board drinking the last of his tea, and out on the dry bed he saw something rising. It was a bell of violet and teal, pulsing slow, trailing ribbons of light down into the cracked clay where the water used to be. It was as big as a cartwheel and it hummed, and the clay under its shadow turned briefly soft and blue.

He did not run. He had been raised by fishermen on the coast before he came inland, and he knew a jelly does not hurry. He waited until it drifted near enough that he could see the spots along its body, bright as coins at the bottom of a rockpool. Then he folded his jacket on the seat and walked out to meet it.

They say the lake came back that night for an hour, deep enough to cover the van wheels. In the morning the post was gone and so was he, but the clay had spirals pressed into it, very fine, as if someone had written a letter in water and let the desert read it.