Colourful jellyfish tattoo on a forearm, with a red bell, long trailing tentacles and a teal watercolour-style background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red jellyfish on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large red jellyfish with a glowing orange bell and long, thin trailing tentacles is tattooed across the forearm. The jellyfish's lower body fades into grey and dark red dotted detail, and the tentacles are drawn as fine dark lines. The background uses soft teal, blue and green washes that suggest water and give the piece a painterly, watercolour-like effect.

Forearm Jellyfish Tentacle Ocean Water Sea creature

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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

Mind the guy rope, and sit down before the lamp goes out, because the generator has opinions. There, that's the tank at the back, behind the cracked mirror. Don't tap the glass. Pearl Ashworth tapped it once, the summer her husband sold the elephant, and the jelly took it personally.

Keep reading

That jelly was the last thing the Marlowe and Sons Travelling Wonder had that the council couldn't put a price on. Red as a pillar box, bell the size of a tea tray, and it pulsed like a lantern somebody was carrying up a stair. The show was dying around it. Clowns drove off to call centres. The big top got patched with tarpaulin off a sunken barge. But every night old Mr Marlowe lifted the lid, the blue bulbs came on, and the whole tent went quiet, grown men holding their children's hands.

Then one October a girl from Hull came with a sketchbook and asked if she could paint it. He said no. She came back every night for a fortnight, sitting on the same upturned crate with her pencils and her jar of rainwater. On the last night she asked him one question: did a thing that lives in a tank ever get to be the sea? He didn't answer, but the next morning the tank was empty and the sluice gate at the harbour wall was standing open.

Marlowe swore the bulbs were still lit in the water. On slack afternoons, when the tent is near silent and the sawdust smells of rain, I like to think there's a little red bell rising through all those teals and greens out past the breakwater, going where nobody can put a price on it. Now, who wants the tea urn?