Full-colour upper arm tattoo of a red-haired cartoon mermaid with a teal tail, a fish and a trident in a blue underwater scene.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon mermaid sleeve on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A red-haired mermaid with a teal tail and a shell top sits on a rock at the centre of the design, with a small orange and yellow fish beside her. Bubbles, a trident and soft seabed shading fill the blue water behind her, which wraps around the upper arm. The image is a dark, slightly soft video frame, with the person's shoulder and black top visible at the right and no face shown.

Upper arm Mermaid Fish Trident Shell Bubble Underwater Sea Rock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The harbour at Skerrin had a black rock at its mouth that the gulls would not land on, and every evening after the nets were in, a mermaid sat there with her teal tail folded over the stone. Her name was Orla Fenn, and the fishermen said she had hair the colour of rust on a winter gate. She kept a small orange fish called Pilcher for company, and Pilcher talked far more than he had any right to, mostly about the cold and about the state of the bay.

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One autumn the sea came up over the quay in the night, the way it sometimes did, and in the morning the harbour master found his brass trident lying in the mud below the steps, bent almost double. He had not been able to lift it, and nobody else would try. Orla saw it from her rock. She slid down the weed-slick stones, pulled the trident out of the silt with both hands, and set its three prongs straight against her knee. Pilcher said she would catch her death, which was a joke, since she had none to catch.

When she came back up to the rock, a boy from the chandlery was standing on the steps with a lantern, asking the water whether anyone had seen his father's boat. Orla lifted her hand and pointed to the lamp on the far pier, which was the only light in the bay that never went out. The boy walked toward it. The boat came home at dawn, heavy with mackerel.

After that the bubbles rose past the quay in a neat line each morning, and the trident stood upright in the harbour master's window, shining, with nobody quite sure whose hand had left it there.