Colour tattoo of a jellyfish with green, yellow and teal body and long black-outlined tendrils, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jellyfish tattoo on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A jellyfish with a green and yellow bell and a teal and blue body sits on the outer thigh, with long, wavy black tendrils trailing across the skin towards the knee. The linework is bold and dark, with the colour shaded inside the outlines to suggest depth. The photograph is taken at an angle against a blue upholstered chair and a light wall, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Thigh Jellyfish Tentacle Sea creature Ocean

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The oil drum has split on the slipway, so it falls to you to row out past the breakwater before the spring tide turns. Your father is coughing in the lamp room and the boat is already loaded with empty cans. The water is flat as pewter for the first hundred yards, then it clouds to the green of bottle glass, and you see them below the surface: bells the colour of new limes, trailing long black threads like ink poured into milk. Every child on Scarra is taught to keep their hands out of the sea when it glows like that.

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You ship the oars and let the boat drift. A bell rises under the hull and pulses once, slow as a breath, and a thread lifts out of the water and lays itself across your wrist. It is cold, and lighter than string, and it does not pull. Old Mairi used to say the sea keeps a tally of the men it took, and that the jellyfish carry the names up from the bottom so the lighthouse can read them. You have never believed her. You believe her a little now, with the thread drying on your skin into a faint silver line.

You row the rest of the way without looking down, counting strokes the way your father taught you, until the steps come up slick and familiar under the boat. The drum is heavy and sweet-smelling when you tip it onto the rope. Up in the lamp room the wick has gone dim, so you pour in the fresh oil and strike the flint, and the glass fills with a light that is green at the edges and gold at the heart.

Your father looks up from his chair and asks what took you so long. You tell him the sea was busy. Out past the breakwater, the bells keep rising, one after another, and where each one passes the water flashes like a struck match.