Fine line tattoo of two blue and pink jellyfish with soft watercolour-style shading, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two jellyfish on upper back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

Two jellyfish drift diagonally across the upper back, with their bells and long trailing tentacles drawn in fine black outline. The bells are filled with blue wash and dotted ornamental detail, while the lower bodies and tentacle areas fade into soft pink and red. The colour sits loosely over the linework, giving a watercolour effect against the skin, and the design is framed by the bare skin of the shoulder blade.

Fine line Back Jellyfish Tentacle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the jellies came in again on the spring tide, two of them, drifting past the lifeboat slip as though they had arranged to meet there. I stood on the bottom step with the lamp and watched their bells lift and sink, blue at the crown and going rose-red underneath where the light caught them.

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You will say I am romancing them. Maybe I am. Mr Pascoe at the chandlery says they are only water and bad temper, and that the fishermen net them and throw them back in the mornings because they tangle the lines. But I have been mixing the cakes of colour you sent me, the cobalt and the madder, and every time I try to paint them the wash runs before I can stop it, so the blue bleeds down into the pink and I cannot tell where one animal ends and the sea begins.

Yesterday Harry Coad lifted a net with one caught in the mesh and it hung there, trailing its threads like wet cotton, and I asked him to leave it. He looked at me as if I had asked him to leave a gull on the hook. He tipped it back and it went down slowly, the ribbons last of all, and the other one turned on the slack water and followed it out past the wall.

I have pinned the best of my sketches over the stove. The two of them are drifting diagonally across the paper, the black lines of their tentacles running on past where I meant them to stop, and I have not had the heart to rub them out. Come at Michaelmas if you can. Bring the good brushes. I think they will come back in with the tide, and I want to be ready to get the colour right before they leave again.

Your loving sister, Ada