Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a jellyfish with a large eye in its bell and a woman's face among its trailing tentacles, with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jellyfish with an eye tattoo design sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch on paper of a jellyfish whose bell holds a large detailed eye, with a woman's profile partly hidden among ruffled, frilled tentacles below. The linework is fine and dense, with stippled and hatched shading that gives the eye and the tentacles depth. The composition runs diagonally down the page, with small bubbles scattered around and a black pen lying at the lower right.

Jellyfish Eye Woman Face Tentacle Bubble Sketch

Find an artist for this

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

Mara had been hauling lobster pots off Skerry Point for thirty years before she noticed the jellyfish always turned its great dark eye towards the harbour mouth at dusk. Her father said it was only the light on the water. Her mother said the sea kept its own accounts and did not share them. Mara liked to think it was counting boats.

Keep reading

The winter the ferry went missing, the men came down to the quay with lanterns, and nobody would say the thing they all feared. Mara walked the shingle alone at low tide. In a rockpool she found the creature stranded, its bell pale as skimmed milk, and the eye in its crown swivelled to find her face. She lifted it in both hands, cold and heavier than it looked, and carried it past the breakwater to the deep water where the current runs north.

When she came back the frost had furred every rope. Tom Galbraith, who had called her a fool at the wake, was waiting at the slipway with a torch. The ferry had limped into the lee of the Wren Stack with a cracked rudder and a dead engine, and had lain there all night because the captain had seen one steady light on the water and steered for it. There had been no lamp lit on that headland for twenty years.

Mara never saw the jellyfish again, but she kept a stub of pencil in her coat from then on and drew a small eye on the back of every pot tag she wrote. When the lads asked why she always went down to the water at dusk, she told them she was keeping count.