Black and grey blackwork jellyfish tattoo with dotted bell and long trailing tentacles on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jellyfish tattoo on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A jellyfish with a domed bell and long, wavy tentacles drifts diagonally across the skin. The bell is shaded with fine dots and stippling, while the tentacles use dense hatched and engraved-style lines to show their folds and translucency. The image is entirely black and grey and is framed closely on the skin with a plain light background.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Jellyfish Tentacle Sea creature Ocean

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The calm had held the barque Restitution for nine days, and by the ninth the tar was soft in the seams and nobody spoke above a murmur. Ada Penhallow, the cook's girl, came up from the galley with a bucket of slops and said there was a lady under the bowsprit. The men laughed at her until they leaned over the rail and saw it: a pale domed bell pricked all over with dark dots like frost on a window, trailing long ribbons through the water as slowly as a widow's hair in church.

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Captain Harrow said a jellyfish was only weed with ambitions, and he would not have the boy Tom lower a net for it. But Tom had been sick since Madeira and wanted something to look at that was not the grey sky. He sat cross-legged on the forecastle each evening and drew it on the back of a manifest, hatching the tentacles with a stub of charcoal until they looked folded like wet linen left out on a line.

On the twelfth morning a wind came up out of the south-west and the jellyfish was gone. Tom kept drawing it anyway, in the log, in the margins of the rations list, until the captain snatched the book, read the page and went quiet. He had a daughter in Bristol who had once drawn that same creature for him on a scrap of napkin before he sailed.

They made port with the sheet folded inside the captain's coat. Ada says the boy still keeps it, and when the sea lies flat he holds it up to the lamp so the ribbons show through the paper and the bell seems to breathe.