Colour tattoo of two jellyfish with splashed watercolour style ink in teal, pink, green and purple, placed across the upper back.

Watercolour jellyfish across a back

Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two jellyfish, one larger above and one smaller below, with trailing tentacles that fade into the background. Black outlines and dotted detail define the bell shapes, while loose, bleeding washes of teal, pink, green and purple suggest watercolour. Ink splatters spread around the figures, and the composition runs diagonally down the upper back.

Back Jellyfish Tentacle Splatter Ink splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer to the fire, all of you, and mind the sparks, for this is the tale of the two lanterns of Varre Bay, and how the sea taught a fisherman's widow to keep a light burning without asking anything of it. In the old kingdom of Ysmerlay, where the harbour walls were built from ship's ballast and the gulls were said to carry letters, there lived a widow named Maud Tennick who kept the bay lamp on the north headland. Her husband had gone out one February and not come back, and the lamp was the only thing she still knew how to tend.

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Every night the lamp drew the jellies in from the deep water, great pale bells that swam up on the tide like slow ghosts with the light caught in their throats. Maud loved them the way you love a thing that cannot love you back. She would sit on the wet rock and watch them pulse, their long trailing threads dragging through the green and violet of the water like ink let loose in a basin, and she would say to them, go on then, go where you're going.

One night a jelly came up larger than any she had seen, and beneath it came a smaller one, dimmer, its bell spotted with light like a sky. The two of them hung in the lamp's glow and did not drift away. Maud understood at last that they were not lost. They were waiting for her to stop watching the sea and start looking back. She lit the second lantern that had been gathering dust in the store, and the bay filled with colour, teal and rose and a green like new sorrel, bleeding out into the dark until even the gulls turned their heads.

In the morning the fishermen found the harbour full of splashed light and nobody could say where it had come from. Maud slept until noon, her hands open on her lap, and when she woke the tide had carried the jellies away, but the ink-bright water was still there on the rocks, drying in the sun.