Light blue scale tattoo on the outer thigh of a person lying on a carpet, with a drawn wave design on paper beside them.

Blue scales tattoo on thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A cluster of overlapping blue scale shapes sits on the outer thigh, with soft light and mid blue shading giving each scale some depth. The tattoo is shown in blue ink only, with a darker background and legs crossed in the frame. Beside the leg, a sheet of lined paper on the carpet holds a drawn outline of waves and the word Mermaid in script.

Thigh Scale Fish scale Wave Mermaid

Find an artist for this

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 sea in our kingdom of Vellmere never kept still, and my mistress Orla Quine said the scales came off the tide the way a cook takes skins off onions, one at a time and with some complaint. She had been collecting them for thirty years from wrecks off the Skerry Teeth, and she kept them in a biscuit tin on the windowsill of the lighthouse keeper's cottage we rented from nobody. The night the tin rattled loose, I found the lid off and a single blue scale gone, and a trail of wet footprints on the flags leading to the back door.

Keep reading

I followed them down the shingle with a lantern that kept guttering in the wind. Past the boathouse there was a girl sitting on a rock, her tail folded under a grey shawl, drawing waves in the sand with her finger. She had a sheet of ruled paper pinned under a stone beside her, and she had written MERMAID across it in curling letters, the way children do when they are trying to make a word look like a wave. She said her name was Essa and that she had come up the Teeth to find her own missing scale, which she believed the witch had taken, and which she needed to get home.

I did not give her the tin. I gave her my own hand, and we walked back up the shingle together, arguing about whether the sea would forgive a thief. At the cottage door she pressed the sheet of paper into my palm. Under the waves, in small blue capitals, she had added a line I hadn't seen before: KEEP WHAT THE TIDE GIVES BACK. Mistress Quine never mentioned the tin again, though the scales in it grew, from that night, a faint and certain shimmer.