Small jellyfish tattoo with a dark dome and orange and pink tentacles on the side of a person's neck, above a white shirt collar.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small jellyfish tattoo on the neck

Neck · Mixed · Photo

A small jellyfish sits on the side of the neck, with a dark brown or near-black bell and trailing tentacles shaded in orange, pink and pale yellow. The linework is soft and the shading gives the bell some depth, while the tentacles fade into thin, translucent strands. The subject fills only a small part of the frame, with the person's dark hair and a white collared shirt at the edges.

Neck Jellyfish 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

Your father keeps the tank under a tarpaulin now, because the generator only runs the lights on Saturdays and the water has gone cloudy at the bottom. Tonight the Pemberton Brothers Travelling Marvels has four punters on the bench outside the big top, and one of them is asking whether the jellyfish is real or painted on the glass. You tell him it is real. You tell him it has no brain, no heart and three hearts' worth of patience, which is a line your mother wrote on the poster in 1979 and nobody has checked since.

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The jellyfish is called Mrs Ashdown. She is the size of a dinner plate, bell the colour of stewed tea, with a fringe of tentacles that flush orange and pink when the spotlight catches them just right. Nobody bought a ticket to see Mrs Ashdown last season. You still feed her every evening with a pipette of brine shrimp, because the only other thing you know how to do is hold a rope steady while the trapeze man climbs down, and he left in March.

On the last night of the month the council man comes with a clipboard and a face like cold porridge. He stands in front of the tank a long while. Then he asks, quietly, what she does when no one is watching, and you realise he means it kindly. You tell him she drifts up to the surface and back down again, slow as breathing, trailing the faint colour of a sunset nobody stayed to see.

He writes something on the clipboard. You never find out what. In the morning the tarpaulin is gone and so is the tank, and there is only a wet ring on the car park tarmac, shaped like a bell.