Realistic colour tattoo of an orange jellyfish against a starry galaxy on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Orange jellyfish over a starry galaxy on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic jellyfish with an orange bell and trailing tentacles sits at the centre of the design. Soft blended shading gives the bell volume, while white star sparkles and pink and purple nebula clouds fill the background in blues and teals. The tattoo runs vertically along the forearm against a plain black backdrop.

Realism Forearm Jellyfish Galaxy Star Nebula Space Tentacle

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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

Sit nearer the stove, the last northbound is an hour late and the kettle has only just come to the boil. You want the one about the jellyfish, do you? Everybody on this platform asks for that one once the lamps go dim.

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Mabel Crane kept the lamps at Thornby Junction for forty years. Every night she climbed the ladder to trim the wicks, and every night a jellyfish hung above the water tower, orange as a coal, its bell pulsing slow over the sidings. Nobody believed her. The stationmaster said it was the sodium glow caught in the cloud. The signalmen said it was gin. But Mabel saw its tentacles trail through the stars, gathering the bright specks like a girl stringing beads.

One winter the tower's light failed and the night mail came through blind. Mabel went up the ladder with a paraffin lamp and a box of matches, and she found the jellyfish snagged in the telegraph wires, its long arms tangled in cable and frost. She did not cut it free. She lifted it gently, the way you'd lift a sleeping child off a bench, and let it drift up past the station clock into the pink and violet clouds.

The mail arrived on time that night, guided by a light nobody could explain. Mabel was never seen on the platform again. Some say she went up with the jellyfish. Others say she only retired to Blackpool. But on every clear night, look up past the water tower, and you'll see the orange bell drifting over the sidings, dragging its little stars behind it.