Black linework jellyfish tattoo with purple and blue watercolour washes on skin, the bell shaded pale and the trailing tentacles drawn in black.

Jellyfish with purple and blue watercolour splashes

Other · Mixed · Photo

A jellyfish is drawn in black linework, with a pale, lightly shaded bell and long trailing tentacles that have dotted accents. Purple and turquoise watercolour washes and splatters sit behind and around the body, giving a loose, painterly effect. The composition is vertical, with the jellyfish drifting down the limb and the colour fading out at the edges.

Other Jellyfish Tentacle Watercolour splash Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down before the sun gets under the awning, because this is a long one and you'll want your back against the post. My grandfather drove the Salt Road when it was still gravel, and he swore to me that the sea used to come up to the petrol pumps at Ouvra. Not in his time, you understand. In his grandfather's. The water went out, the way water does when it has somewhere better to be, and it left its furniture behind.

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On the hottest afternoon he ever worked, he saw a jellyfish hanging over the road a mile past the dead well. A bell as pale as a boiled egg, trailing threads that went black wherever the light cut them. Behind it the air was streaked violet and a sort of turquoise, like a bruise trying to decide what colour to be. He stopped the lorry. He got out. The thing turned slowly in the heat shimmer and began, very gently, to come down toward him.

He said he didn't run. He said he took the tin of dates from the cab and held it up like a lantern, because his mother had told him that anything from the deep will follow a light if it is hungry enough. The jellyfish stopped a yard above the gravel. Its tentacles brushed the tops of the thistles and left a dotted trail, little beads of wet on the dust, and then it rose again and went off over the ridge toward wherever the sea would be if anyone asked it nicely.

Some nights I think about that, and the dates, and what it was hungry for. Finish your tea. The road is quiet now, but listen: in the morning you'll hear the gulls, and there are no gulls out here, so you'll know where to look.