Pencil drawing of a jellyfish with a shaded, ribbed bell and long, wavy tentacles on a cream background, a design that could suit a tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pencil drawing of a jellyfish with trailing tentacles

Black and grey · Flash

A jellyfish is drawn in graphite pencil on cream paper, with its bell at the top and long tentacles trailing down and curling across the page. The linework is fine and precise, with soft shading on the bell and along the tentacles to suggest translucency and depth. The drawing is in greys only and sits centred on the page with plenty of empty space around it.

Jellyfish Tentacle Sea creature Bell

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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

The specimen had been in the tank since Tuesday, and by Friday Mr Hallam wanted the plate finished before the tide turned the water to soup. Edith sat at the window of the Marine Station with the light coming off the Sound at an angle that made her pencil slide. She had sharpened four leads that morning and would need a fifth before the bell was done.

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The creature did not hold still. Each time she laid a stroke along the ribs, the water shifted and the bell lifted, so the drawing had to be built from memory and from the glimpses between currents. Hallam tapped the glass with his pipe. 'Shade the margins, Miss Rook. The trade expects it to look wet.' She shaded them. She gave the tentacles a grey so pale it was nearly the paper, and where they crossed she left the cream showing through, the way light passed through the real thing.

On Saturday the bell stopped pulsing. Hallam carried the tank out to the yard and tipped the water into the gutter, and the thing lay on the flagstones like a dropped umbrella. That evening Edith pinned the plate to the board and found she could not lift the pencil from it. The lines had outlasted their subject. On the sheet it still rose and fell, its tentacles curling off into the empty paper beside it.

She signed the bottom corner, E. Rook, and then, because the sea was not hers to fill, left the rest of the page empty.