When a woman’s butchered corpse washed up near Coney Island eight years ago, cops strained to make out a lone, cryptic clue: seven letters inked on the victim’s discolored calf, apparently spelling Monique.

In January 2015, birders had spied a decomposing hand in a littered inlet of Gravesend Bay, past the ballfields inside Calvert Vaux Park.

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That winter, other body parts were found on a hill overlooking the bay: a severed human arm in a tree, perhaps snatched and moved by a bird, and leg bones and a pelvis nestled nearby. A foot, with nails polished in a translucent glitter, was detected by a police dog who found many of the body parts.

The medical examiner determined the woman was the victim of homicidal violence. DNA linked all the body parts, but neither the DNA nor the woman’s fingerprints were in any database.

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Brooklyn detectives determined that the ink, which seemed to date to the 1980s, spelled out Monique. But nobody matching Monique’s description had been reported missing anywhere in the country.

A Monique in Queens was healthy. A Monique in Brooklyn was accounted for, too.

And so the case turned cold with each passing year.

But the mystery of the murder of Monique has now met a surprising breakthrough.

The tattoo did not spell out Monique. The name of the woman whose dismembered body washed ashore in Brooklyn is Jennifer McAllister.

All that’s left now is for detectives to figure out who killed her — and why.

McAllister was 33 when she disappeared at some point in 2014, likely after she stopped going to her scheduled doctor appointments.

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After her body parts turned up, cops held out the possibility that the tattoo could read as Ronique or even Conique, but decided it was Monique.

Until about a year ago.

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That’s when the NYPD, using familial DNA — a method now prohibited after an appeals court ruled in May that such searches need to be approved by lawmakers — got the break it needed.

“We were able to identify a relative of the victim,” Chief of Detectives James Essig told the Daily News. “She recognizes the tattoo, and says it’s not Monique. It’s Konique.”

Konique is the name of the victim’s son, Essig said.

Konique, now 21, was 13 at the time, three years older than his brother, who was raised by his dad.

“It’s been tough for [Konique],” McAllister’s sister said. “It felt like his mother just abandoned him.”

The sister, who is in fact named Monique, said the family was frustrated by attempts to report McAllister missing, with police telling them they couldn’t immediately file a missing person report because McAllister is an adult and not mentally ill.

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Detectives chased a number of theories through the years.

An IUD was found in her pelvis and she had a broken rib that was healing. She also had a pelvic artery stent, most likely implanted to prevent deep vein thrombosis. The devices, however, don’t have serial numbers on them, and a police check with area hospitals was fruitless.

There was even a theory that her body was dumped in the water by an out-of-state trucker who may have slept in his vehicle after parking on a service road off the Belt Parkway.

But it turns out McCallister lived a little more than a mile away, at an apartment in the Marlboro Houses in Gravesend.

The sister, Monique Bailey, 42, said she and her family have no idea who killed McAllister, who she described as a doting mom.

“She was just with her son all the time,” Bailey said. “She was a very loving and happy person.

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“Her smile — the way she cared.”

Bailey said an ancestry.com profile helped police identify her sister.

“Someone contacted my aunt and gave her a number to call,” Bailey said. “They asked if she was related to my grandmother, my aunt’s mother. After phone calls back and forth we actually realized what was going on.”

Bailey said it was encouraging at first to find out her sister had been found, and then the reality of what had happened to her set in.

“I mean at [that] point we didn’t know the details so we were just excited,” she remembered. “But once we found out the details we were devastated.”

Essig said the goal now is to arrest the killer and send him to prison. The murder, he said, likely happened shortly after McAllister stopped showing up for her regular doctor appointments.

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“Who killed her would be speculation at this point,” he said. “But anybody who knows her or knows the circumstances of her disappearance please give us a call.”

There is a $12,500 reward, with tipsters asked to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS.