Two photos of a colourful jellyfish tattoo in pink, red, blue and purple on the side of a ribcage, with painterly shading and trailing tentacles.

Watercolour-style jellyfish on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a jellyfish with a pink and red bell shaded with blue and violet, and long, thin tentacles in red, blue and dark purple trailing downwards. The soft, blended shading gives a watercolour effect, with some defined dark linework on the frilled tentacles. The left panel is a close crop of the ribs, and the right panel shows the same tattoo from further away with the wearer's torso and a hand at the top of the frame.

Ribs 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

The tank hums at the wrong pitch again, and you have to lay your palm flat against the glass to know which pump is failing. Down at the bottom of Tideward Reach the medusae are pulsing in their slow circuits, forty of them, pink bells gone violet where the pressure lamps catch them. Your job is to count them twice a shift and write the numbers on the slate by the hatch.

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Dask, the old maintenance engineer, says the jellies were bred to eat the microplastic clouds that drifted off the seawalls after the Drowning Years. He says a lot of things. But the numbers on the slate have been climbing since the spring, and yesterday you counted fifty-two, and the water at the intake grille tasted of nothing for the first time in your life.

You take the spare line down to the lowest ring and fasten a float marker to a trailing tentacle, dark purple where the frill has gone ragged. It drifts up into the blue haze, a thin red thread against the dark, and you watch it go until your breathing gets loud in the mask. Then you tap the glass twice, the way Dask taught you, and the nearest bell turns toward you, slow as a question.

Back on the surface you write fifty-three on the slate. Under it, in smaller letters, you write the name of the marker. Nobody will read it for years, and by then you will have stopped expecting anyone to. The lamps dim at dusk, the medusae keep their slow rhythm in the dark, and the water goes on clearing one thread at a time.